During treatment I slept on the couch downstairs a lot. I’d like to say it was for practical reasons, and some of it was, but the honest reason is that I was more comfortable alone during that time. So the couch became mine.

There were a lot of nights where I felt sick and couldn’t sleep. That was just the texture of that year. You lie there in the dark with a body that won’t settle and a mind that won’t quiet, and you wait for morning, and eventually morning comes. I got through most of those nights the way I got through most things. Alone, quietly, on my own.

But there was one night I couldn’t. It wasn’t that the sickness was worse than usual. It was that I was worse than usual, somewhere underneath the sickness. I had hit a wall I didn’t know was there. I lay on that couch and I simply could not do it by myself for one more hour. I was out of whatever it is you run on when you run out of everything else.

My parents used to stay with us a few days a week during that period, and it happened to be one of the nights they were there. My mother was asleep and I did something I almost never let myself do. I went and I woke her. I felt so guilty. That’s the part I remember most clearly, even before I remember the relief. Waking her in the middle of the night, this woman who was already giving up her own days to come take care of me, and needing her anyway. Apologizing before I’d even finished asking. I just told her the truth, which was that I was tired of it. Tired of being sick. Tired of the nights. Tired all the way down.

She came back into the living room with me. And she was in it with me. That’s the only way I know how to say it. She didn’t try to fix it, because there was nothing to fix. She didn’t tell me to buck up or that it would all be fine. She sat with me in it and she told me it was understandable. That it wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t fair, and that honestly she’d have expected me to be much more upset much earlier than this. She gave me permission to be exactly as done as I was. She wanted me to be okay, and the way she pursued that was not by rushing me out of how I felt but by staying with me inside it until it was bearable again.

I have thought about that night many times since, and I think it might be one of the purest examples I have of being truly taken care of. Not managed or fixed. Accompanied.

She’s gone now. And I’ll be honest about where that leaves me. Most of the family I came from is gone. My grandparents. My aunt. My mother. My father moved away. When I think about who would come now if I woke in the night and couldn’t do it alone, the list is very short, and most of the names on it are in the ground or too far away to reach.

Some days it feels like I don’t have a family anymore. But that isn’t the whole truth, and I don’t want to end on the part that isn’t whole. I have my children. The direction has simply turned around. I was the one on the couch once, being told it was understandable, being allowed to fall apart in front of someone who loved me. Now I’m the one who sits in it with them and tells them it isn’t fair and I’m not surprised they’re upset and I want them to be okay.

She taught me how to do that. She taught it to me on a couch, in the middle of the night, when I woke her up and apologized and she waved the apology away and stayed.

That’s the thing about being loved well, even once, even briefly. You don’t lose it when you lose the person. You just start doing it for someone else.