The Physicality of Grief

Day 532.

The second year is WORSE. Everyone says so.

The initial panic, the state of emergency passed.

Frozen into a stone, I now have to figure out how to live, how to breathe.

The torturous grief took a year to fossilize in my body, encased in layers of multi-colored minerals as tough as diamonds, layers and layers encase my grief.

Hidden from me too, is the true depth and danger of what I feel.

Today in somatic trauma therapy, the steel cage around my chest, where my fossil lies, deep and inaccessible, was eased and massaged. Like a giant nail to the right of my heart, I had twisted my ribs.

I walk and talk and function to a degree, but inside I am holding and bracing against the shock and loss I cannot bare.

As the cage was gently mobilized, I wept and wailed, the most disturbing and pathetic sounds came from that place.

The bracing I have put up against my grief has actually twisted ribs! It’s so shocking to me.

Why do I brace so?

“If I let it out I won’t stop.”I actually spoke it.

This immobility corset of steel disables my breathing and the same web of fossilized stony steel is also around my brain, no doubt, contorting that too.

I’m trying to breathe normally but I feel I have broken ribs, and so it is safer to breathe within the cage; shallow and tiny - still in shock.

The process of easing it, releasing it, was agony, both mentally and physically.

For as in all recovery, the cure is not a warm and soothing awakening, but a Six Flags Park full of terrifying rollercoasters, with the straps and bars pressing and twisting your tenderest parts.

I am still so bemused by the physicality of grief.

The panic and fear of the past ten years locked inside me with my loss. A she-wolf hissing and fighting, protecting her cub that is already dead. 

Insanity and brain function all on max level, spinning and growling, spitting at imaginary fire, spinning and turning as I feel foe all around me.

All around my dead cub.

All around my living one too.

Fear of the foe.

Fear of my enormous emotion.

Rage too.

Rage at the injustice.

The hopelessness of it all.

My inability to connect, when in truth, that is what I need, a little at a time, to heal.

It amazes me that I bother to try and heal, when all I want is this to be gone.

For me to be gone from this trauma that I could not prevent.

But I have a cub remaining, and so I live on for him.

But I rage for the pain this has caused him too.

My instinct, so visceral, that I will fight on.

For him, George.

For other’s children.

The friends refusing Vicodin prescriptions for their 8 and 12 year olds is testament to Luke’s death already making a difference.

The list of rocks that I must push up the hill increase.

How can one woman do this?

Afraid I will let Luke down, again?

I will find a way.