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Last month I got a call from my husband's old company saying he won a raffle for an all-inclusive one-week trip to a resort in Maui, Hawaii. My husband died three years ago. The woman on the phone said Gary had entered it in 2019. The prize was about to expire and they'd been trying to contact him for months. When they couldn't reach him they pulled his emergency contact. Me. She said I could still claim it if I wanted. I had until the end of October or they'd have to forfeit it. I sat in my car in the Walmart parking lot and cried. Not because of the trip. Because the last time anything good happened was so long ago I forgot what to do with it. Gary died of a heart attack in our 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 we retired and finally had time. The timing was never right. That was always our excuse. And then he was gone. I'm 58. I work the customer service desk at a Lowe's in Columbus. I've been there nine years. I answer phone calls and speak to customers every day. I sit in the same chair for 8 hours a day. My hot flashes started in my mid-forties. I thought they'd stop after menopause but they didn't. I wake up almost every night drenched in sweat. Sometimes three or four times. Heart racing. Pillows soaked. I throw the covers off. Twenty minutes later I'm freezing. Pull them back up. An hour later my face feels like it's burning from the inside and I'm sticky and gross and I have to get up again. At home I've learned to manage it. Fan on high. AC at 65. Cool shower before bed. Stand in front of the open freezer at 2 AM when it gets really bad. I know how that sounds. But it works. Away from home? In an environment where I can't control the temperature? Can't stand in front of their freezer at 2 AM? Not sure if I’d be able to make the room cold enough? That sounded like a nightmare. I almost didn't go. I told myself I couldn't take the time off work. Too far to fly alone. I'd feel stupid sitting at a resort by myself. What I really meant was it was supposed to be our trip. And going alone felt like proof it would never be our trip. My daughter said "Mom. He entered that raffle for you. For both of you. And he won. You have to go." So I went. The resort was on the west side of the island. I had a room with a view of the ocean. White bedding. Thick textured comforter that looked like it belonged in a magazine. I pushed it aside and made room for the cooling blanket I'd packed in my suitcase. I paid over $200 for that blanket two years ago. The package said it would stop hot flashes. It didn't. I still overheat. Still wake up drenched. I only kept it because the pattern was nice. But at least I knew what I was dealing with. Hotel bedding was a risk I wasn't willing to take. First night I went to bed around 11. By midnight I was awake. Hot flash. Sweating through my shirt. Heart pounding. I threw the cooling blanket off and stood on the balcony in the ocean breeze. The most beautiful place I'd ever been and I was standing there drenched at midnight because I couldn't lie down without waking up feeling like I was inside an oven. I went back inside around 2. Shoved the cooling blanket aside and pulled the hotel comforter over me. The texture settled against my skin and something felt different. Not cold. Not hot. Just right. Cool against my arms but not that icy AC feeling I was used to. I thought I'd switch back in a few minutes. I woke up to sunlight. 6:40 AM. I couldn't remember the last time I'd slept that long without a hot flash. I lay there trying to figure out what happened. The ocean air? Exhaustion from traveling? Different climate? Then I looked at the comforter. I pulled it closer. It was cream colored, not white like I’d previously thought. It had a textured design on it, like a raised pattern across the whole thing. Heavier than my cooling blanket but somehow felt lighter on my body. The texture wasn't slick like my cooling blanket. It was soft. Breathable. Like air was moving through it instead of trapping heat underneath. There was a small tag sewn into the corner. "Bohobed." I'd never heard of it. I Googled it from my phone. Reviews came up. Women my age. Hot flashes. Tried everything. Waking up drenched for years. All saying the same thing. This was the first bedding that actually kept them cool. I put my phone down. I was here because Gary won a raffle he never knew about. Not to shop for bedding. But I left the hotel comforter on the bed. Second night I didn't touch my cooling blanket. Used the hotel comforter from the start. I slept six and a half hours straight. When I woke up I reached over to check if the sheets were soaked. They weren't. No sweating. No racing heart. Just dry. I sat on the edge of the bed just feeling what it was like to wake up dry. Not exhausted from waking up four times. I didn't know when that had last happened. Day three I drove to a waterfall. Alone. Windows down. Halfway there I realized I wasn't thinking about how tired I was. For the first time in years my first thought in the morning wasn't about sleep. It was: Gary would've loved this drive. I didn't think about being hot. There was nothing to think about. That night I ordered one from my phone. King in oatmilk. I don't know why I ordered two sets. I knew why. I just wasn't ready to say it out loud. They were waiting when I got home. I got nervous when I saw the boxes. Started doubting myself. What if I was wrong? The hotel room was different. The ocean air. Being away from everything. Maybe the comforter had nothing to do with it. Maybe it was everything else. I opened the first box. Same textured design. Same weight. I held it in my hands and thought about how breathable it felt those nights at the hotel. Heavy but somehow still cool. Both things at once. First night home. Same bed. Same house Gary died in. Same everything. I pulled the comforter up to my chin and there it was again. That same feeling from the resort. My body temperature just... maintaining itself. Not overheating. I woke up at 6 AM. Seven hours straight. No hot flash. Sheets dry. It wasn't the ocean air. It was the comforter. Week one. Still got one hot flash some nights. But not four. I stopped setting the fan on high. Week two. Had energy to clean out the closet I'd been avoiding for months. Gary's side. The one I hadn't touched since he died. Week three. My daughter came over for dinner. She looked at me while I was chopping vegetables and said "Mom, you look different. Rested." I was. For the first time in years. Week four. I realized I hadn't stood in front of the freezer at 2 AM in almost a month. I'd been doing it so long I didn't notice it was gone. It's been two months now. The hot flashes are mostly gone. Maybe one a week instead of four a night. I sleep six, sometimes seven hours straight. I didn't realize how much the broken sleep was affecting everything else. Going to the store without needing to sit in the car after. Playing with my grandson without getting irritable. Simple things I used to struggle with. Last week I unpacked the second set. I put it on Gary's side of the bed. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else. It makes sense to me. He entered a raffle for a trip we'd take together. He won. He never knew. Three years later his prize gave me something back. Not the trip we planned. Something better. Sleep. Energy. The version of myself I thought was gone. I tried to order one for my sister last week and it was sold out. Took three days before it came back in stock. They're a small company. They only make about 200 at a time. When they sell out you have to wait months for the next batch. If you check and they're available, don't wait. You don't need a resort in Maui. You just need the comforter they put on the beds. I spent years thinking the hot flashes were just part of getting older. That I'd have to stand in front of the freezer at 2 AM forever. I thought they were unavoidable. Turns out I just needed better bedding. And it was a lot more affordable than the cooling blanket that didn't work. Your move.