Can't Sleep

The last couple of nights I have been laying awake in my cozy bed.......thinking. I think about all the paperwork I have to do at my job (and how I really dislike that). I think about my mom's birthday in a few days (and how sad I am that she is gone). I think about all I have to do for Christmas and how to make that more fun and enjoyable vs. chore-like. But I think what is really keeping me awake and laying wide-eyed in bed as my husband snores away is the recent news that a close relative was admitted to a mental hospital the day after Thanksgiving. "So and so was making coffee and forgot to put the pot under the dripping water," a family member tells me. "So and so was talking about the past one minute and then about the garden the next," I hear from another family member. "So and so would just walk away muttering when the words failed to come out in the right order," is the sad story. Was it a change in meds? I remember when my husband was in rehab and given a strong pain med that quickly scrambled his brain. One minute he was asleep and the next he was asking me how the experiment we were in was going. "The what?" I asked him. "The study we are in!" he repeated his crazy talk. And I'll never forget a mentally ill college student I once had who would ramble on incoherently in my Abnormal Psychology class. He had recently been released from a mental health hospital and decided he could live without his medication. I will never forget the bug-eyed look on my student's faces as he made a series of senseless and rambling comments during my lecture on schizophrenia, psychosis, and why people might carry on incoherently when they break from reality. Is it our family history of mental health issues? I think about Grandma Dixon who heard voices on the radio when she didn't have the right combination of meds. Who flew to Hawaii in search of Elvis when she stopped taking whatever concoction of drugs kept her sane. Was it the stress of life? New love, new career path, new training. Who knows at this point. It's what I wonder about as I lay in my cozy bed, wide awake past midnight......