Born. Mourn.

Insomnia to my sleep patterns is like the water pressure at the bottom of Niagara Falls. It's always on high. But sometimes it's on even higher than high. Hopefully, those sentences put you to sleep.

Last night, Dame Insomnia visited me and she wouldn't let go. She tortured me like a telemarketer with Tourette's. She had my number and she was relentless. Like she was selling solar panels. Or running for office.

At least, I'll give her this, at least Dame Insomnia came well-armed with a topic last night. There was a theme to the torments that kept me awake. Those torments were varied, of course, but like the travails faced by Odysseus on his twenty year journey from Troy back the Ithaka, they were all related.

I realized when the dark Dame released me after hours of torture, the torment had been centered around a simple idea. 

All the times I got knocked down.

Knocked down so completely I was afraid I would never stand again.

There were at least four times I was struck by such blows in my life, and, again like Odysseus visiting the Underworld, Dame Insomnia took me on a tour of all four of them last night.

The first knock-down was when my sister died in a horrific motorcycle crash. I had to go down to the New York City morgue on First and 31st Street to identify the body. 

The attendant came out and prepped me.

"It's pretty bad," he warned. "She's pretty bruised up."

Then a doctor came out. He asked my permission to use her body for an autopsy or whatever they use dead 47-year-olds for. A barbeque?

"No."

"It's very helpful if we can examine her."

"No."

They wheeled her out on the gurney and pulled a dusky white sheet away to reveal her face. 

"That's her," I said. "I've identified her. Goodbye, Nancy. Take her away."

The eager doctor came at me again.

"No."

We then switched to my kids deciding to cut me off and not talk to me for a year. The imaginary camera focused not on them, not on me, but on my sadness. A sadness, really, that will never go away. A sadness as complete as any I have ever felt because it ushered in a loneliness and an estrangement from nearly all creatures great and small. My reason to be did flee. 

Then was the phone call I got from the HR apparatchik at Ogilvy at 4:30 in the afternoon--seven hours after the rest of my firing class was fired. What made that so horrid wasn't being fired. It was the constant onslaught of lies about how wonderful and inclusive Ogilvy pretends to be but how in reality they hate old people as much as Norman Bates hated his mother. For all their bushwa about inclusion, just 2% of WPP employees are over 60, vs. 20% of the population. So much for the fairness they so ardently lie about and applaud themselves for. Oh, and get awards for. 

Remember: the worst lies are the ones you tell yourself.

The final scene was my best friend, Fred, dying. He died after a long illness--the big C--and he was just 63. We'd been friends for almost exactly a half century. He saved my life, Fred did, in ways I could never adequately thank him. No one could.

When your best friend dies, it's not like everyone moves up a notch and your second best friend takes his place. No, there's a hole that will remain as empty as a promise for the rest of your life. 

Fred was also the rare person who got me. There aren't many. In fact, with him gone, there might not be any.

Worse, those last three scenes, all happened at once. I was left and bereft and my life had no heft left.

Those were the four scenes that Dame Insomnia dragged me through, like Achilles dragging Hector three times through the dust around the grave of Achilles' love, Patroclus. I was dragged through these moments.

And at each juncture, I took notes.

I said no to my sister, too often. I said no, don't come over, I'm tired, the evening before the morning she died. I did the same with Fred. As much love as we had for each other, we didn't talk or see each other as much as we should have. On the other hand, with my kids and my job at Ogilvy, I gave too much. I was too there. I had subsumed myself too much for their benefit.

That was a harsh session, I dreamt to myself once Dame Insomnia parted. That was something out of Eugene O'Neill served with a self-loathing chaser.

But I was finally asleep.

We're all born in hell.

At least I got a blogpost out of it.