Grief Journal: Six Years On

There is a before, and an after. The world that existed with him in it, and the world that exists without him.

I’ve been living in the world without him for six years, today.

I’ve done all the things you’re supposed to do as a parent coping with grief. I’ve gone to therapy, I’ve taken anti-depressants, I’ve focused on mourning, I’ve focused on living, I’ve been a support for others, I’ve tried to find meaning in his loss, I’ve “done good” through his death … all the things. Yet, here I am, still mourning. Still so heavy with grief.

It’s not as if I cry every day any more, or even all that often. And I certainly live a full life. I laugh, I have relationships with my family and friends, I can experience joy and fun and silliness and all the good emotions.

And yet.

And yet, there is a heaviness. A constant ache. The sense that something is wrong and can never be right again in this lifetime. It makes it hard to go through this world; as if I’m being asked to climb a mountain but without all of the necessary equipment and oh yeah, maybe one of my arms isn’t working? Or, I have to run a marathon except I never trained, I’m barefoot and no one gave me the route map?

I started a new kind of therapy this year, called somatic therapy. It’s body-centered and examines the link between the body and mind when dealing with traumatic experiences and emotions. One of my personal challenges is that I live almost entirely in my head, for lots of complicated reasons. This can be great in many situations but is not so awesome when you are dealing with complex grief. I think it’s why regular therapy hasn’t helped much. I can logic my way through any conversation, including about losing Charlie, but that doesn’t do anything with the emotions, not really.

In somatic therapy, we talk but only as a way to access the physical feelings. I know about the mind/body connection, of course, but now I truly understand it. Going through this process is like my very own minute-by-minute podcast of the absolute worst day of my life (that’s where people devote an episode of a podcast to do a deep dive into a movie or show, one minute at a time). Four months in, and we are still unpacking the initial phone call when I learned the news (to be fair, it took a couple of sessions to get started).

Instead of rushing through and talking about what happened, the logistics and how it felt and what I did, yada yada … we stop and I feel it. What physical sensations does remembering this evoke? What exactly does it feel like? Where is it in the body? What happens if we do this? And then we try to get to a more comfortable physical place through movement or eye work or whatever.

It is exhausting. And powerful. And I hope it’s going to be healing. Because if nothing else, I’ve learned that I physically carry the pain of losing Charlie around with me every day, and it is a burden my body was not designed to carry.

I was not meant to be in a world without the bright, blinding light that he was. I should have a 16-year old about to go into his junior year. But I don’t. And six years on, I still don’t know how to carry that.