Grief Time

 

I committed to writing courageously here, to not hiding the good or the bad. And then I disappeared for over a month. It's been a little turbulent over here, I admit. 

But somehow, it's also been fascinating. 

Let me explain. 

In the past, since Daniel died anyway, winter has been very painful. I don't know why holidays are so painful. There are many reasons I've thought of, but I also have the feeling that there are many more reasons I haven't thought of yet. 

But this year has felt different. It's still painful, perhaps even more so than before, but there has been less emotional 'drama'. We did not travel for Christmas, and we didn't agonize about it until the last minute like usual. We just decided we wouldn't and left it at that. Sweet relief! I dread the process of trying to figure out Christmas plans. It's not that I don't want to see family - it's just complicated. 

Another new thing this year was that I woke up the day before Daniel's birthday shaking, nauseous, dizzy, and dry-heaving. I figured I must have gotten some terrible bug, but when Monday found me feeling just fine, I slowly realized that what I felt over the weekend was my body's expressing the trauma and grief experienced around that time five years ago. This concept still kind of baffles me, but when I mentioned the experience to my therapist, I hadn't even finished my story and she was nodding and affirming, 'oh yes, the body remembers'. 

Woah. 

I think my body has been remembering a lot this winter. 

There have been several other days, moments, and experiences this winter where grief and trauma have manifested in unexpected ways. It's always big, and sometimes feels threatening. This week the nightmares got progressively worse until I wondered, 'Can one die from emotional strangulation in a dream?'.

The last one had me reeling for hours. I wrote about it in my journal. It helped some. As I thought about it, the dream was clearly about Daniel and his death. I looked up what January 6th was like when he was here. Guess what? It was his "peak day". The day he graduated to an open crib and was at his peak of growth and health and thriving. You can read about that here. 

Realizing that this terrible dream had come on the morning of January 6 - Daniel's peak day - gave me chills. Truly, the body remembers. And this year it remembers loudly. 

As turbulent as it has been to feel all these feels, there is an aspect of the experience that feels good; the kind of good that tells me this is right and necessary. Holding space for all of this means it doesn't have to stay trapped inside of me with nowhere to go, and no ability to move as it is built to do. 

Remember that post a while back about how the Latin root for emotion is emover - to move? I realized that the same works even in English - emotion. Motion is in the word. The same holds true in Portuguese as well. That tells me that emotions need to move. Perhaps this is why holding them deep and hidden away hurts the body so much because we are forcing them still against their nature. 

So while it is terribly uncomfortable and sometimes just terrible, I am grateful for the movement that has been happening recently, and I hope that it will lead to even deeper healing.