Stony Sleep

By Holly Aszkenasy

/ Nonfiction /    

i.

What is insomnia? Insomnia is boring. Dull to hear about and even more tedious to experience. It’s searching “where is joss stone now” at 3 a.m. (filming Instagram Stories about baking, is where, crooning softly to the camera Isn’t this delicious? as she fingers a tray of vegan peanut butter brownies) and nervy, aching teeth, and the desire the following day to consume more fistfuls of sugary fruit than a fully grown bonobo. It’s fielding suggestions from literally everybody about lavender and melatonin and some CBD oil that helped their sister-in-law, and it’s ordering poorly formatted e-books by gurus who’ve cracked a code overlooked by the entire medical establishment, yours for only twelve pounds ninety-nine. Insomnia is forking out for a memory foam mattress that promises to change your life but is essentially just a pad for lying on, and it’s passing interminable hours on the phone to the council-run CBT service during which an earnest young therapist will advise you to banish your “unhelpful thoughts” to “worry jail.” Insomnia is the leaden tang of sleeping tablets that lives in the crevices between your gums and cheeks, and that no amount of brushing ever seems to dissipate. It’s ringing the doctor to talk him into giving you the extra-strength version for just a while longer, cracking a lame joke in which you promise not to become “another statistic” in the opioid crisis. Insomnia is slavish adherence to a finely tuned bedtime routine: one carefully timed cup of chamomile tea the color and consistency of a urine sample, three laps of the roads around the flat, twenty minutes of deep breathing with the nasal corporate monk on the meditation app. Insomnia is the thin grey light of dawn in a silent house. Insomnia is the birds starting up with their mocking chirruping, and it’s every bad decision you’ve ever made, from dropping out of your PhD to dropping out of your marriage, parading itself before the gritty, dried-out husks that are your eyeballs now.

ii.

The day after I turned 34, I was scrolling through Instagram when I learned that my grandmother was dead. My cousin had posted a picture of her captioned only with a black heart emoji. I was surprised by the medium of my discovery although not by the message: Nana had been sick, and growing sicker, for a long time. She died in the nursing home in which she’d spent the final weeks of her life, although the last time I’d seen her she’d been in hospital, lying high on a gurney and sporting a pair of orange wraparound sunglasses. I hadn’t wanted to go, but my dad, foretelling her imminent demise, had cajoled me into visiting. The ward in which she was housed was low-ceilinged and unpleasantly warm, its fuggy air overlaid with the smell of wee and industrial-strength bleach. As I shrugged off my cardigan, I noticed several photos of her dog, Alfie—a hulking red staffy-lab cross with a temper so severe he was banned from the local park, and whom Nana called her “beautiful lion baby”—tacked up by her bed. There were no pictures of her human family. I patted her skinny arm hello and she peered at me questioningly from behind the orange glasses. “It’s Holly,” I said, loudly. Nana nodded and turned back to the TV. I seated myself on one of the uncomfortable chairs arranged along the wall, worn smooth and shiny by the behinds of innumerable bedside visitors before me, and began to fiddle with my phone. Soon Nana became absorbed in a daytime chat show. “That woman’s hair looks like a man’s!” she complained of the hostess, to nobody in particular. When the show finished, her attention shifted to the staff responsible for her care. “Spies, all of them!” she whispered stagily, jabbing a finger at the saintly nurses sponging down their geriatric charges and swilling out bedpans. “Tell me what you’ll say to them if they catch you!” After forty minutes of sitting on the shiny chair while my bottom glued itself ever more inextricably to the seat, I said that what I really ought to be doing was getting going. Nana started to cry and clutched at my sleeve. Her hand was shrunken, threaded with thick purple veins and with a cannula protruding from the dorsal side. It was the last time I saw her alive.

iii.

Sleep hadn’t always been impossible. When I was 30, I left my husband, and in the weeks that followed I existed in a state of near-permanent torpor. Haunted by the reproachful silence of my newly empty flat, I went to stay with my mum and slept for twelve hours a night on the pull-out couch in her spare room. During the day I would collapse into a fretful slumber on the living room floor, lacking the willpower to direct my body into positions like “standing upright” or even “sitting.” The effort of taking a shower would require a compensatory nap; a trip to Tesco would knock me out for a whole afternoon. To shield me from the terrifying reality of having ended the relationship that had defined, to date, my entire adulthood, it seemed my brain had succeeded in numbing me into a kind of temporary coma. It wasn’t until I made the inevitable return to my flat and to the queen-sized double I’d once shared with my husband that my sleeplessness began. Soon I was waking in the night coated in salty sweat and struggling to breathe, and then again at dawn in tears of lamentation which had sprung from some deep hippocampal well before I’d even regained consciousness. That white Ikea bed was a ghost ship, adrift in the stagnant waters of my failed marriage. It had been insane to imagine I’d be able to carry on sleeping in it. 

iv.

My grandfather died when I was 17, and at his funeral Nana draped herself in a veil of dramatic black lace. The officiating rabbi, who’d been drafted in for the occasion and had never met Grandad, read solemnly from a tribute Nana had penned herself: He gave with his hand, and also with his heart. In the months leading up to his death, Nana had left several messages on our answering machine claiming that Grandad was trying to poison her coffee. “Eh-llooo!” she’d cry, her voice laced heavily with the distinctive inflection of her native German. “My ’usband is trying to kill meee!” She’d regularly called the police to complain about him, and more than once he’d spent the night in the garden shed after she’d bolted the front door and refused to let him back into the house. My grandparents had been unhappily married and then divorced, but neither of them would move out of their north London semi and so they’d stayed on there together in an entrenched and bitter stalemate. Grandad would escape his turbulent home life by taking lengthy trips to his flat in Haifa, where he spent his days by the pool eating the kind of food his doctors had advised him not to and admiring the local women in their swimsuits. A couple of years after his final and fatal heart attack, my parents got a divorce of their own and Nana expanded her repertoire to include a series of theatrical hexes directed at my mum. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” Nana would coo, as I perched on her sofa while the Christmas lights she kept up year-round glowed and flashed, “if your mother blew up in an explosion?” She also adopted Alfie, who could always be counted upon to greet guests with an earnest attempt to rip their faces off. Nana would look on fondly as he lunged for me at the front door, teeth bared and snarling. As I grew older, my visits to my grandmother’s house grew further and further apart. By the time she died, perhaps inevitably, I’d pretty much stopped going to see her at all.

v.

What is insomnia? Insomnia is finding your ex-husband’s new girlfriend’s Twitter—and by “finding,” you don’t mean “stumbling upon,” because that thing has taken several weeks of painstaking digital archaeology to unearth—and insomnia is scrolling through her feed in the dark, indulging yourself in the minutiae of what you fantasize to be a cruel facsimile of your former relationship. (She sleeps with his unwashed t-shirt, and so had you! She posts selfies in the gilt-framed mirror of his parents’ living room: the very same living room in which you had spent a decade’s-worth of birthday parties and Christmas Days!) It’s texting screenshots of the new girlfriend’s tweets to your friends at 4 a.m., demanding they corroborate your deeply unironic analysis that she is “unquestionably a psycho” but “a really boring one.” It’s composing manic emails to your ex-husband, imploring him to meet you for lunch so that the two of you can discuss your “future.” It’s the quelling of the few remaining sparks of reason that still flicker in the far reaches of your darkened brain. Insomnia is the transformation of flesh into voyeuristic ectoplasm, and it’s the deranged, queasy longing that fills your belly as you float miserably over the life you’ve chosen to leave. 

vi.

The crematorium at which Nana’s funeral is held resembles a hastily designed 1970s leisure center, and for a place filled with the remains of the dead is remarkable only in its determined soullessness. Around the low brown building is a stubbly-lawned garden of remembrance, adorned with balloons and gently mouldering soft toys. The funeral before Nana’s is running late, so my relatives and I loiter awkwardly in the lobby while a disembodied voice booms over a loudspeaker, intoning the Lord’s Prayer for somebody else’s dearly departed. Suddenly Nana’s coffin is carried in, topped with a spray of roses. The Lord’s Prayer stops, and in honor of her favorite TV show, the Columbo theme starts up. My relatives and I take our cue to file into the chapel, where the casket is placed on a dais behind an open pair of burgundy velvet curtains, and a picture of Nana posing in her garden with Alfie set in front of it. I take a seat in the front row of the chapel’s vinyl conference chairs and try to feel something—if not inconsolable sorrow, then at least a little bit of sadness—but nothing comes. Perhaps it’s the beta blockers I took on the train; perhaps it’s just exhaustion. The ceremony lasts twenty minutes, and when it ends the non-denominational minister bows her head, the curtains close around the coffin, and we all troop out to the concrete courtyard behind the furnace. 

vii.

What is insomnia? Insomnia, according to the Internet, is the vexing problem of waking regularly in the night, or very early in the morning, or of never falling asleep in the first place. It’s a cause of irritation and depression and the concomitant decline in your performance at work. It's the dampening of your sex drive, the aging of your skin, and the impairing of your ability to make sound judgments. But really, what is insomnia? Insomnia is none of these things. Insomnia is at once never sleeping and never being fully awake. It’s the compression of nuance—of first light and twilight, noontide and gloaming, luminosity and shade—into a dreary swamp of gelatinous, non-chronological sludge. Insomnia isn’t short-term or long-term or even chronic: insomnia is the complete stopping of time. What is insomnia? Insomnia is its own kind of death.

viii.

At Nana’s wake, my uncle produces a diary, kept by Nana in the 1950s when she and Grandad were newly courting. The diary is passed around the table, and when it’s my turn to leaf through it, an upsurge of grief swells for the first time from somewhere within my enervated system. The handwritten entries, full of hope and possibility, convey a version of my grandmother I’d never known. Pressed carefully into the volume are dried flowers and postcards, brittle now with age. As I turn the pages, I find photos, too: of Grandad, dashing in his captain’s uniform on the deck of his ship, and of Nana, winsome in a summer frock, beaming into the camera. The early days of their romance, it seemed, had been intense and whirlwind. I slug some wine and contemplate my grandparents’ bitter power struggle, decades long and frequently unfathomable, and the Nana I’d known in her later years, irascible and paranoid, and I wonder how much I’d ever actually understood her. It occurs to me that by the time she’d started writing the diary, she’d already survived a hellish wartime childhood and was a migrant twice over. Lamb curry from the wake’s buffet rises and churns unpleasantly in my stomach. I wonder how much I’d ever actually understood anything. I close the book, slide it across the table to my cousin, and head to the loos to swallow another beta blocker. 

ix.

The day after we cremate Nana, I don’t go to work. Instead, I take the bus to the park near her house where she and I had spent a clutch of long-ago summer afternoons, both of us shrieking with unselfconscious joy as she chased me up and down the grassy slopes. When I was little, I’d found her unpredictability and lack of inhibition exciting. I’d collapsed in fits of laughter as she crawled around the floor of a packed restaurant, mewling and hissing like a cat, and swelled with pride when she led me to the cupboard in which she’d hidden the teddy bears whose stomachs she’d slashed open and stuffed with jewelry, treasure she promised would one day be mine. I’d thrilled to her tales of her stint as a fortune teller—when, she said, people had queued around the block to have her read their palms. And I’d loved to watch her skate, which she did both fearlessly and at great speed. On the rink, I’d been panicky and uncoordinated as a new-born colt, but Nana had clasped my hand, coaxed me away from the rails, and together we’d flown across the ice. 

Today, the January morning is frigid and the park deserted. As I make my way along its damp paths, I pass the smooth, perfectly angled tree trunk I’d once repurposed as a slide, and at the bottom of the hill, the sculpture of the sunbathing girl reclining by the rose beds, her bronze sandals cast carelessly, permanently aside. I keep walking, past the vacant bandstand and the silent playground, and on to the children’s zoo, where I pause at the enclosure of the rhea, that flightless and disconcertingly prehistoric bird with its indignant stare and jerky up-and-down bobbing of the head. The cold has numbed my fingers now, even through the thick wool of my gloves, and I am dull and hollow as the sky. I think about the noise my husband had made on the night I’d said I was leaving, the cry of an animal caught in a snare. I think about a teenage Nana, waiting every day at the end of the street for the brother who’d never come home from the war. The rhea and I gaze at each other through the chain-link fence for a while, and then I trudge back up the hill to the café, order a coffee, and think about planting my face onto the sticky wooden table in front of me and falling asleep forever.