the physicality of grief.

i can relate to those people that have phantom limb pain following amputation.  when elly died it felt as if a limb had been cut from me.  i kept staring at my arm wondering why she wasn't there.  i had carried the child for nine months and then held her almost continually for five weeks... other mama's out there know, in the newborn phase, you don't go more than a couple hours without holding your little one.

the hours ticked by... one hour without holding her, two hours without having her, three hours... until a brutal 24 hours had ticked by.  i remember being desperate to hold anything, a baby doll, a stuffed animal.  anything to fill the void, my body felt empty, deprived of the warmth and love of my beloved child.
when we started taking addy and lane out again i remarked to jim that it was like we were forgetting something.  i would start to say "don't forget the baby carrier" and cut myself short before the words even started tumbling out of my mouth... it was the whisper of a thought cut short.



when jim died, it was even worse.  i am still carrying the physical effects.  july will mark six years since we met.  six years of being inseparable.  our entire marriage consisted of seven nights apart, four of those were when he traveled for his previous job.  the day before he died, we were sitting out in the garage, me on his lap and i was rubbing his thumb with mine.

12 hours later he was gone.

my hands are lost, clumsy in their motions without jim's head to rub or hand to hold
my lips are confused, wondering where their counterparts are
my eyes are sad and wandering, looking for their match in his green

my entire physical being is thrown into shock.  sad and pathetic without it's constant, it's homing beacon, guiding it in its motions
it is as if my sun is gone, and i am left still orbiting, thrown out into a dark and distant space, without any light to guide my way.


maybe you will always be, just a little out of reach




yesterday i found a souvenir from our honeymoon and i cried so hard i was hyperventilating.  i was home alone, my two children in the room next to me and my chest hurt me so bad i would have thought i had gotten kicked.  the air was knocked out of me.  i had to get on the phone with someone right then, the pain too great to bear alone.  all i could say was "it hurts, it hurts so badly"

the intertwining of our neurological, physical, and spiritual aspects is so apparent during grief.  everything is so separated in our culture, even down to "classes"

math, science, psychology.  they are all taught separately, as if they had nothing to do with each other or they didn't impact each other.  i will tell you in this- there is no separation.  grief has taught me the constraints of our knowledge are a lot tighter than we believe them to be.

there are no explanations, no reasoning, no making it better

"it hurts. it hurts so badly"