While I watched, I took hits of my weed pen and tried to will myself to sleep. I also often contemplated opening another bottle of wine to chase the one I had inevitably finished at dinner—but I was anxious that the recycling bin might look concerning. I often just took a Xanax instead. No one was counting my pills except my doctor. She had suggested the weed pen because she was less worried about my becoming a stoner than my developing a dependency on benzodiazepines. I decided that together they would be most effective to usher me back to bed, so each night I played with dosages in hopes of finding the right mix. So far I was up to 1.5 milligrams of Xanax and three hits of the highest-THC pen I could find. But I was still running on two or three hours of sleep, max, or what people call fumes. I found it was hard to get up in the morning after sinking into my pillow. I would usually spend ten minutes determining if I was still high (answer often yes) before finally pulling myself up and into a too-hot shower to sober up.

When my insomnia had become unmanageable, my attempts to avoid grief had finally placed me exactly where I needed to be: among people struggling with their own sorrows—whether it be about humans, dogs, or a cat now gone—who wanted to do something about it.

In the session, I sat across from a young man crying about how he had lost his father in 9/11—a first responder—and his stepfather had left him and his mother, so she had decided to focus all her attention on drinking. Andrew said he wanted to prepare for her inevitable death, which was why he was here. He was tough, he said. He had been through a lot. Everyone made sure to remind him of that every time they looked at him. He had moved to L.A. to get away from people who knew his story—and the looks they gave him. He was a survivor, but didn’t want to feel that way all the time. But what he broke down about was not the eventuality of his mother’s dying, but that his girlfriend had slept with someone else. She wasn’t supposed to leave him, and yet she did. He said he thought they had made an unspoken pact: he would take care of her pain and she would take care of his. In leaving, she had become another variable in his compounding grief.

“There must be something wrong with me,” he said. “I must be radioactive to be around.”