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This sleep will not make things right, on that they can all agree. It will not give sense to the senseless; it will not fill the yawning hole. But maybe, just maybe, it will help. Because they have each been told, over and over, that the only way out of a hardship is through. But nobody ever told them that they had to stay awake.
Poppy Fields? The experimental sleeping treatment was certainly gaining traction, but many people still saw it as just that: an experiment. A place where human lab rats disappeared for months at a time. A place that preyed on the grieving. A place for only those eccentric enough, reckless enough, weak enough, to accept the many consequences in the hope of healing from loss.
Patients at the Poppy Fields enter a long-term state of dormancy, akin to a medically induced coma, that typically lasts four to eight weeks and is designed to help those recovering from a devastating loss. The Poppy Fields’ promise to the grief-stricken? Sleep here for a month, and be healed when you wake.
“Grief. The moment when you realize that your world and the world are entirely separate. When your world has come to a grinding halt, when you’re drowning and flailing about, and the world just rolls on without you.”
“My friends asked me how I could possibly let myself sleep for such a long time—could I really allow the world to just move on without me? They had no idea that the world was already moving on without me. And that’s precisely why I wanted to sleep.”
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.”
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 sanitize the most brutal, and yet most essential, elements of life.
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.
received dozens of applications colored by so many shades of loss: The family whose house burned down, taking all their heirlooms with it. The woman whose surgery saved her life but cost her the chance to give birth. The man with early-onset Alzheimer’s, losing his own past piece by piece. Grief in all its shape-shifting forms.
she had the confidence of an athlete, the dramatic flair of a theater kid, the romanticism of a reader, and yet she wasn’t really any of those things, and was neither popular nor unpopular as a result.
She was just a little bug on the windshield of the world, so her problems were just a little bug’s problems, outranked by pretty much every other problem facing the planet as a whole. And when all the old people in the positions of power called upon Sky and her generation to fix the problems of the world that they couldn’t, Sky wanted to have actually seen the world for herself, to know what she was saving and how much it was worth.
The thing about grief is that it’s never just grief. For Sasha, grief was also fear. Fear that she might never love again, fear of her unknown future. For Ray, grief was also anger. Anger at the way he’d lost his brother, at the place he blamed for taking him. And, for both, grief was also guilt. It was living with the question: How much was my fault? It was wondering what you could have done differently.
the Poppy Fields, already controversial, already bizarre and abstract and hard to explain, was the perfect place for the blame and the anger and the need for answers to coalesce in one frightful whole.
In life, there would always be loss, and the desire to sleep through the pain.
“It’s the journey, not the destination.”
But I’ve learned that the heart is a very big place, with room for many loves inside. And when one of those loves is lost, sometimes it’s too much to ask all the other loves to make up for the one that’s missing. The heart needs time to reassemble itself, to learn how to beat again when a part of it is gone.
“But they’ve received *hundreds of thousands* of applicants. Shouldn’t we be more distressed by the fact that so many of our fellow humans are living in such deep despair? Think of how severely they must be hurting. Think of how badly we must be failing them. Maybe if we found a way to connect with each other more, to give each other a little more compassion and grace, to ask people what they need from us instead of always making assumptions, then maybe no one would feel the need to sleep there anymore.
“Losing someone . . . it’s not like a sickness or a temporary rough patch you’re trying to deal with. Even if you sleep for two months and wake up and feel less awful, the work isn’t done. This doesn’t end. This is the rest of your life. There’s no getting over, there’s just . . . getting on. Figuring out who you are now, because you sure as hell aren’t the same person as before. But maybe that doesn’t have to be all bad.”
she would want him to find joy. And hope. And purpose. And love. She would want the world for him. The beautiful world that she’d seen from the mountain, sprawling at her feet.
remember my mother saying once that death anoints all sinners as saints. You read any eulogy or obituary, and you’d think that anyone who ever died was perfect. When someone’s gone, it’s easy to forget all the flaws, all the fights. But . . . that flattens them. It makes them boring. My husband had a short fuse. He once hurled a book against the wall because he found it so infuriating. He talked way too loud, which annoyed the hell outta me. If he didn’t like you, he made no attempt to hide it. He was very well-read, and he believed in his values very strongly, and sometimes that made him very
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you’ve still got a road ahead of you, and it’s long and windy as hell, with switchbacks and curves that’ll make it feel like you don’t know if you’re coming or going. So, you just drive it as fast or as slow as you need, don’t give a damn what other folks think . . . Just don’t stop driving, okay?”
Love makes people do wild things, things they can’t understand, things they may have sworn they would never, ever do. So, were they ever to lose that love, I imagine they might do just about anything.
It’s been said, many times, that we all die twice. The first, the actual moment of passing, and the second, the last time someone living says our name aloud.
It’s not enough just to say the names of our lost. The names must have power, must grab hold of our hearts, must remind us and teach us and inspire us.
Love changes us. It strengthens us, and dents us, and lifts us, and guides us. If we sleep, if we suffer the side effect, if we’re no longer shaped by the people we love . . . who are we?
they were loved so deeply, so fiercely, that someone was driven to choose this strange and challenging path in their absence.
This wall that was a tapestry of love and loss, a history of joy and suffering. A map of a world that sometimes felt too unbearable to live in. And a record of all the people who chose to build a home here anyway.
This was the other side of love. This was the aftermath, the cost, the opposite end of the bargain. This was the dirty, damp confetti and trampled flower petals, stamped into the muddy ground and tossed about by the wind, long after the parade had ended. This was the sad, lonely echo in the hall, now that the dance was over. Here, in this room, was grief. But grief was love in its second shape.
