Health · fiction
How to take care of your mental health after a loss
A story about a Bolivian shopkeeper who stops sleeping after losing his business, and about the night he decides to ask for help.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
He stopped sleeping the day he closed the shop.
Not all at once. At first he woke at three in the morning and lay looking at the ceiling until five. Then at two. Then at midnight. Then he stopped lying down. He sat in the kitchen, in a red-earth town in eastern Bolivia, with the television on without sound, doing and redoing sums in a notebook that had no clean pages left.
He was forty-eight. The building supply shop had been his father's, and before his father, his grandfather's. Three generations. And it had closed with him. A giant supermarket, from a foreign chain, had opened two blocks away, and in a year the shop was empty. He let the six employees go, one by one, looking them in the eye. He paid what he could. He still owed the rest.
His wife said he needed to rest. His children said he was different. He said he was fine.
He wasn't.
He didn't eat properly. He forgot things. He got irritated by the children's noise. Sometimes, driving, he thought it would be easier if he didn't arrive anywhere. That thought frightened him, and he pushed it to the bottom, where it stayed, waiting.
On one of those sleepless nights, sitting in the kitchen, he had a vision. Or a dream with his eyes open, he can't say.
He saw the shop full, in the eighties. His grandfather behind the counter, a pencil behind his ear, laughing with a customer. He saw his father, young, carrying sacks of cement on his back. He saw himself, a boy, playing among the shelves of screws, sorting them by size, as if they were treasures.
And he saw his grandfather stop laughing. He saw his grandfather, one night in 1985, sitting in the same kitchen, sleepless, with a notebook of sums. The inflation of those days had eaten everything. His grandfather had also lost almost everything. No one had ever told him.
He saw his grandfather get up from the chair before dawn and leave the house. He saw him walk to a neighbor's house, an old man who knew herbs and knew how to listen to people. He saw his grandfather sitting on the neighbor's porch, head bowed, talking for hours. And he saw his grandfather come home, in the morning, lighter. Not with the shop saved. With his mind saved.
The vision ended. It was almost morning.
He sat still for a while. Then he did something he had never done. He woke his wife and told the truth.
"I'm not fine. I haven't been for months. Sometimes I think things that frighten me."
His wife didn't scold him. She didn't say it was nonsense. She held his hand.
That week, he went to the neighborhood health post and said the same thing to a doctor. The doctor wasn't surprised. He said it had a name and had treatment, that big losses affect the body and the mind, and that asking for help was the hardest step and the most important. He referred him to a psychologist.
He went. He went the next week, and the next.
It wasn't fast. There were still bad nights. But, little by little, he lay down again. He ate again. He heard the children's noise again without getting irritated.
One day, sorting screws in an old box he had kept from the shop, he caught himself smiling. He was sorting them by size. Like a boy.
Bairo describes a time when, in his words, he was "broke, bankrupt in spirit and defeated", yet still had a flame of hope and faith. It was there, he says, that everything began again. Read: The coin and the road.
The way forward
After a big loss, insomnia, irritability and dark thoughts are signs that your mind needs care, not willpower. Tell the truth to someone at home and seek a health service; in Brazil, the health post and CAPS centers offer free care. If despair tightens its grip, call CVV at 188, at any hour; elsewhere, reach out to your local crisis line.