Last October I collected all four railroad pieces from McDonald's Monopoly and won a trip to Maui.
I need to say that again because I still don't believe it.
I eat at McDonald's maybe twice a week. Coffee and an Egg McMuffin on my way to work. I peel the game pieces because why not.
Most of them are property pieces for sets you'll never finish. I toss them in the cup holder and forget about them.
I had three of the four railroad codes by mid-September. My coworker Brian told me the fourth one was the rare piece. One in a million or something like that.
I wasn't holding my breath.
October 7th. Medium fries with my coffee because I was having a bad morning.
I peeled the sticker and stared at it.
#826.
I sat in my car in the McDonald's parking lot and cried.
Not because of the trip. Because the last time anything good happened to me was so long ago I didn't know what to do with it.
My husband died three years ago. Heart attack in the garage on a Sunday morning. He was 59.
We always said we'd go to Hawaii. It was our someday trip. The one we'd take when the kids were out of the house and we'd saved enough.
The timing was never right. And then he was gone.
I'm 58. I work the front desk at Interstate Ford in Miamisburg, just south of Dayton. I've been there eleven years.
I answer phones, I greet customers, I sit in the same chair eight hours a day.
The neck pain started in my early fifties. I figured it was just getting older.
Stiffness every morning. Takes me twenty minutes to loosen up before I can turn my head enough to back out of the driveway.
By afternoon my shoulders are so tight I can feel it up into the base of my skull. Most days I'm taking Advil by lunch.
I've slept on my side my whole life. And every night my right arm goes numb underneath me. I wake up at 2 or 3 AM and have to shake it out.
After Gary died, everything got worse. I wasn't sleeping. The stress, the empty house, the way grief sits in your body like a weight you can't put down.
My neck tightened up and never loosened back.
I told myself I couldn't take the time off work. Too far to fly alone.
I'd feel stupid sitting on a beach by myself at a resort I'd never in my life be able to afford.
What I really meant was that it was supposed to be our trip. And going alone felt like proof that it would never be our trip.
My daughter said, "Mom. Go. He'd want you to go and you know it."
So I went.
The resort was on the west side of the island. I had a room with a lanai that looked out at the ocean.
The bedding was white and thick and the kind of soft you only see in places where people pay more per night than I make in a week.
I dropped my suitcase and stood in the doorway for a minute.
That first night I lay down expecting the usual. Stiff neck by morning. Advil on the nightstand. Two or three hours before I wake up and can't get comfortable again.
My head settled into the pillow and something was different.
It was just... held. Like the pillow knew where my neck was supposed to be.
And it was so comfortable. That melting kind, where you find your spot and you don't want to move an inch.
I lay there waiting for it to go away, thinking: what on earth is causing this feeling? The mattress? The linens? The pillow?
The next thing I knew, I woke up to sunlight.
I looked at the clock. 6:40 AM. I'd gone to bed around 10.
Almost nine hours. I hadn't slept nine hours straight since before Gary died.
I sat up and turned my head. Both directions.
No pinch at the base of my neck. Barely any stiffness. My arm hadn't gone numb once.
That afternoon I walked down to the water.
My neck was loose. Not perfect. But looser than it had been in months.
I stood there looking at the ocean and not thinking about pain. That was the first time in three years.
All day I'd been telling myself it was the travel. The warm air. Being somewhere new. Sheer exhaustion finally catching up with me.
I lay down on the same pillow.
Same feeling. Held.
I slept seven hours.
When I woke up I reached for the Advil on the nightstand.
Then stopped. I didn't need it.
Two nights in a row. I couldn't remember the last time that happened.
I picked it up. Heavier than I expected. When I squeezed it, it pushed back. Not like memory foam. Something smaller, tighter inside.
There was a zipper around the outside. I unzipped the cover. Two pillows stacked together. A thicker one and a thinner one. I'd never seen a pillow you could open.
There was a tag sewn into the corner. "Nuzzle." I'd never heard of it.
I put it back on the bed.
Day three I drove to Hana. Alone. Windows down. Two and a half hours of curves on a narrow road.
Halfway there I checked over my shoulder to merge and realized I'd just done it. No bracing. No wincing. Just turned my head and looked.
I pulled over at a waterfall and got out.
I looked up.
At the cliffs. At the green. At all of it.
And I thought, he would've loved this.
I lay still thinking: is it the pillow? The mattress? The linens? I didn't know.
Then I woke up and looked at the clock.
6:14 AM.
I'd slept over six hours.
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I turned my head. Left. Then right.
No stiffness. No pinch at the base of my neck. My arm wasn't numb.
I sat up. Looked over at Don's side of the bed. Empty.
I knew where he was.
I ordered two.
I don't know why I ordered two. I knew why. I just wasn't ready to say it out loud.
They were waiting when I got home.
I was nervous.
Maybe it was just the vacation. For a week I'd had no phones ringing, no empty house, no routine reminding me of everything. My whole body had been relaxed for the first time in three years. Maybe that was the cure.
The pillow arriving at my door felt like the real test.
I opened the box. Two layers inside. I took the thinner one out. The thicker one by itself was the right height for me.
First night home. Same bed. Same empty house.
I lay down and there it was.
Held. That same feeling from the resort, in my own bedroom in Ohio.
I woke up at 5:45 AM. Seven hours. No Advil.
It wasn't the vacation. It was the pillow.
First week home, I stopped taking the Advil. Not cut back. Stopped. The bottle's still on my nightstand, full.
Second week. Monday morning, I backed out of my driveway and realized I'd just done it. Turned my head, looked, and went. No twenty minutes of loosening up first. No turning my whole body like a robot.
Third week. Brian stopped at my desk and said, "You've been different since Hawaii."
I asked him what he meant.
"I don't know. You seem like you again."
He had no idea it was a pillow. He thought it was Maui.
Honestly, until I got home, so did I.
It's been three months now.
The morning stiffness is gone. My arm hasn't gone numb since the second week. The afternoon headaches at my desk stopped.
And I sleep through the night now. All the way through. No 2 AM. No shaking my arm out in the dark. Just sleep.
I spent six years managing the pain instead of fixing it. The chiropractor. The massages. The physical therapy exercises I did in front of the TV. The creams that smell like menthol and work for an hour. A cortisone shot that bought me a couple of months.
And the pillows.
The MyPillow I picked up at Bed Bath & Beyond back when they were still around. The Serta from Kohl's. The bamboo one everybody was raving about. A Tempur-Pedic from Walmart. The cervical one my doctor sold me that felt like sleeping on a speed bump.
Six years of pillows that were all going to be the answer.
This pillow fixed it. For just $39...
Whoever stocks the rooms at that resort in Maui could've chosen any pillow. They chose this one.
I put the second pillow on Gary's side of the bed.
I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else. It makes sense to me.
When I ordered, they had 50% off and a 90-night guarantee. Three months to try it. If it doesn't work, you send it back.
My daughter tried to order one after I told her about it and they were sold out. Took a few days before they came back.
If you check and they're available, don't wait.
You don't need a resort in Maui. You just need the same pillow they put on the beds.
I know because I spent six years thinking the pain was just what getting older felt like.
