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the only way out of a hardship is through.
The Poppy Fields’ promise to the grief-stricken? Sleep here for a month, and be healed when you wake.
“Our sleep helps people transition from a place of acute grief, which overwhelms and disrupts their lives, into a place where that grief has been meaningfully integrated into their existence and the sharpest ache has retreated to the background,”
“People come here because the pain of their loss is controlling their lives, and they need to feel like they’re in control again. Our sleeping treatment allows them to reengage with a life of joy, purpose, and fullness.”
Another patient described her experience like waking up to a dry pillow after weeks of crying herself to sleep.
“Grief is an individual journey.
there’s no such thing as a ‘cure’ for loss. You can’t just turn it
off like a light. These feelings will stay with you, in some form, forever.”
Although you won’t be aware of it until after you’ve awoken, your mind and body will be doing the necessary work of healing, all while you’re asleep.
Our sleep helps you process and accept your loss; it does not erase it. Even
Q: If I can still remember the person I’ve lost, will I still miss them? Will I still feel sad sometimes? After sleeping at the Poppy Fields, the pain that first brought you here will have largely subsided. You will hurt less. You will cry less. You will anguish less. But you will always miss the lost person in some capacity, as there will always be an empty space where they once stood. Healing is not a purely linear process, and heightened feelings of sadness may be triggered by anniversaries or other potent reminders, but the pain will never feel all-consuming again. Many former patients
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Our sleeping mind is not truly asleep, after all. It’s still busily working, sorting through the day’s learnings and storing the most important ones as new memories to carry forward.
sleep allowed us to preserve those new memories while also weakening their emotional force.
Once they could no longer feel the intensity of their grief or their affection, it seemed they had almost forgotten they’d ever felt either emotion at all.
And there were even some patients—typically those coping with divorce or adultery—who actually wished for the numbing effects to choose them, hoping to finally be freed from a love that lingered undeservedly, chaining them to their past.
But if this was true, Ellis thought, and the Poppy Fields wasn’t at fault, then that would mean they had helped this man return to his life happier and stronger than before, and then he didn’t even get to enjoy it. Could life really take such a merciless turn?
We may never know if there’s a god out there helping us or hurting us, but we know that humans trying to play God are more than capable of doing some damage.”
The ties between her and Emmy had eroded these past few years, and it was hard for Ava to decipher what she actually knew from what she mostly assumed, harder still to separate the facts from her feelings.
“I don’t really know Emmy. Not anymore,” she said. “But I want to at least try to understand what happened. Why she chose this path.”
But the Poppy Fields was simply too far a departure from conventional forms of therapy, and the sleep struck her parents as somewhat dishonorable.
Life and death, love and mourning, should be treated in certain ways, they thought.
the grief and traumas of history—both personal and communal—were meant to be carried, not discarded. Like weights to be worn all our lives, something to recognize, not to be rid of. To them, the Poppy Fields was an attempt to sanit...
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Was there not a way to honor the past that didn’t press so heavily upon the future?
Are there not, perhaps, some burdens that are just too big to bear?
why shouldn’t Sasha take advantage of all that was offered to her
If the chance to feel less miserable was waiting for Sasha right now in a clinic out in California, why shouldn’t she at least try to grab it?
Sasha was her own woman, yes, but she wasn’t alone in the world. She had to consider everyone around her, everyone she owed so much to, everyone whose lives would be shook by her choice.
All these things could be true at once, she felt: she could love Dean, and she could have her doubts,
how could anyone really know if the love they felt for someone now was strong enough to last a lifetime?
We were married for fifty-one years. But . . . if I am gonna be here for another decade, without Gerry, then I can’t go on the way I’m feelin’ now. She was the love of my life. I never want to stop reachin’ my hand across the bed for her. But I guess I just wonder if maybe it could hurt a little less when my hand hits the empty space.
And Sasha felt quite certain that if Dean had known the full truth, known of the many misgivings that had gnawed at her for weeks, he would not be wishing her well.
Sasha felt like an evil person,
she’d done harm.
She had
wondered, silently within herself, if the wedding might so...
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Her path had been so well lit, and now she’d veered into total darkness. She hadn’t just lost Dean. She’d
lost the person she thought she was and the person she’d planned to become.
How fitting, Sasha thought, that birth and death seemed to share this physical link. How the same bodily techniques used to bring a new life into the world were also called upon to bid another life farewell.
And it didn’t really matter how many courses you took, or books you read, or people you consulted, there was no way to truly prepare for either, she knew. They would always feel thrust upon you. They would always take your breath away.
they really do accomplish what they say they can, then they help people who are grieving get back to their lives. I’m not sure they can help you stop blaming yourself.”
“I loved Dean,” she said. “I still love him. He’s been gone four months now . . . and I miss him every day. So, what if that means that I was wrong when I was having those doubts? What if I was always meant to marry him? What if I lost my only chance at real happiness?”
If she no longer cared so deeply for Dean, would she still feel guilty about what happened? Would she still question if she deserved to find any joy in her future?
The irony that only Ellis had apparently noted: their company was named for Asclepius, ancient god of healing and medicine, whose temples in Greece had often filled overnight with sick worshippers, some sleeping in the sanctuary for several nights in a row, awaiting a cure for their afflictions that might appear in a dream.
joy of being healed upon waking, and the relief of fast-forwarding through the pain while asleep, oblivious and unfeeling. Anesthesia for life’s fathomless heartbreaks.
When you believe in yourself so strongly, it isn’t hard to make others believe in you, too.
She’d been reluctant, thus far, to join a grief support group, out of fear that she didn’t belong, that her doubts about the wedding somehow negated her pain now, so she felt a comfort in simply speaking up, in releasing the feelings of uncertainty and anxiety and guilt and sadness out into the world, so they weren’t just clamoring quietly inside her head.
“We can’t let these rogue scientists turn our country into some numbed-out, drugged-out society where the bonds of family and community will inevitably disintegrate.”
There is actually a clinical difference between grief and depression, despite similar outward appearances. Conflating the two does a disservice to all.
You know, we used to shoot hoops in our driveway all the time, and the only thing we ever worried about was which one of us was winning. We didn’t worry about whether a stranger’s bullet was ever coming for us. But now . . . every child has to worry about that. Honestly, how can any of us live in that kind of world without being driven to sleep?
The thing about grief is that it’s never just grief.
