On Grief, Year Two
ON GRIEF…
These last few months I have felt very far away from myself, which is unusual for me. Puzzling.
It began at Tanner’s one year anniversary.
My body began to spring forward, it ran out in front of my heart…
For a whole year I had given myself all of the time, space, and permission I needed to grieve.
In fact, I had given myself and my body endless room to do whatever it organically needed.
At the outset of my grief journey, I noticed that my body had its own natural intelligence around loss. Much like our bodies have their own natural intelligence in creating life, And in giving birth.
The intelligence of shock, and how it protects. The way lament opens the heart. The way longing connects across dimensions.
I was really quite in awe of it.
So when the gears shifted so abruptly, I found it very jarring.
Discombobulating.
Disconnecting.
I have spent the last few months yearning for the return of the “just-below-the-surface”, grief.
“What is wrong with me” I thought.
All of the sudden my system wanted to go forward again, to build, but I wasn’t ready. It evoked a lot of fear.
That steady flow of grief, like a rushing river, had given me direct access to my boy.
And I have been endlessly grateful to grief for this gift.
Without that fertile, heart-opening, well-spring, at the ready, I’ve actually been a bit bereft.
The other day, in conversation with a friend, I was explaining the way it’s upside down from my normal experience.
I said: “Usually it’s my mind that is totally sane, and my body that is acting up…take anxiety if you will. Intellectually I know that everything is fine, but my nervous system doesn’t. My body doesn’t seem to be getting the message that there is no threat. Only this time, in relation to this bewildering new grief frontier, it’s backwards. I’m intellectually longing and aching for the grief. But it isn’t organically arising for me anymore. It’s not just “there” the way it used to be. This time my MIND wants to have the somatic experience, but nothing is happening. It’s as though my body is prompting me to begin to move on”
There, I said it.
It hung in the air for almost a minute.
She looked at me lovingly, while my eyes welled with tears.
She watched as the realization set in. I have trusted every cue my body has given me along this journey. Why should this moment be any different?
Without saying anything, I saw her acknowledging and validating my internal landscape. Nodding.
So I spoke again. This time a rhetorical question.
Maybe I’m supposed to be moving on?
I don’t know why phrased it as a question, because I knew the answer, and I hated it.
I don’t want to move on from this. I don’t want to leave the cozy, womb-like grief cave I’ve carved out for Tanner and I.
It’s been a meeting space. And served to cocoon us while we reoriented to this new way of relating. And now it was time, to step outside the cave?
It can’t be.
I’m not ready
But my body says it’s time.
It’s a weird thing to be with. Grieving my grief.
Even being with the idea “life after death” feels intimidating.
And yet the threshold is here.
The invitation exists.
It isn’t as though I am not still bereaved. It’s just as all things in life naturally evolve, so too, is this part of my journey. It’s as if the gestational phase of grief is coming to its natural conclusion.
I’m not sure when I will formally step outside of the shelter of my grief.
My highest desire would be to weave a bridge between these two worlds. The meeting place, and the world beyond it.
I’m not sure when I will be ready. I can tell if I stay here too long I might freeze. Stasis could set in. And I can feel that going backwards isn’t an option.
To weave two worlds together necessitates stepping across the threshold. Someday soon.
In the meantime, I’ve finally located myself on the map. I’m IN THE MEANTIME. The time in between. The time in the balance of before and after.
And I’ve decided, that this is a real location. A bit frustrating. But real nonetheless.
Art Signed; Pieces of Blue (feels like the space I’m in now)
