2006-07-28 - 9:07 AM

Yesterday I was up at eight walking through my morning routine as if in slow motion. My head felt thick and foggy. Distant. I could not start any project or write. So I went back to bed with my grief. Crying until I was spent, rocking myself, arms around me. comforting myself. Watching my grief flow from my aunt to my husband "water dragon" to lion. Back to my aunt. Flowing from pain to pain. Feeling the losses... which flow to other losses. Wondering why they all seem to link together in this long chain of dogwood flowers of blood. They always seem to symbolize loss to me. I lay in my soft bed of maroon and green colors. Pushing my feet around the bed for the cool spots. Running my fingers over the smooth sheets. Allowing myself time.

One of the paths of healing i have learned is how to go to the base pain. Our own selves like to mask it in other pains. It's sort of a protection mechanism. walls we put up inside ourselves. We feel a pain and we just stay with that one nursing it. But in reality usually when you find the pain seems bigger than your reason. It's linked to other hurts that need to come up.

Grief isn't something that heals smoothly. That pain comes and goes forever. and every time I have another loss... there they all are. All my losses coming back to get my attention. All of them lined up like babies needing to be fed.

In therapy, this process took weeks. Weeks of agony and holding myself. stumbling through those days doing the needed things. But I learned the more space I gave myself in healing the quicker the process seemed to pass through.

I used to be a woman who never had a minute alone. For years, I went like that stuffing things down. Rushing from job to home to chores to doing for everyone but me. Rolling from one trauma to the next with some strange power. I thought I was invincible.

Then my husbands' death stripped all my skin off. That tough skin that I had built up suddenly was gone. I was nothing but exposed nerves. PTSD. Raw emotion.

I'm sharing my process, my pain. writing it helps me work through it. And if that's all that happens then that's my own healing. But I see it seems to speak to others. So I hope my being naked helps you work through your own path.

Today I'm better. My head's clearer. My eyes hurt. But I feel like sleeping. So I don't think I'm done with this process yet. Sleeping is another mechanism that our bodies use to heal or to hide from our pain. I have to think about which that is for me right now.

I hope I can pass through this on my own. That would speak volumes to me about where I am. But I will seek help if I find I can't. There is nothing wrong with seeking that when it's needed. I just want to use the things i've been taught first.

One dear one "h2ophobic" wrote about how hard it is to feel the pain and not embrace it. That is the whole thing in a nutshell. To embrace it would be to fall down in the black pit and let it smooth over me in numbness. Embracing the darkness. How alluring it can be to allow that. It's almost like an addiction. That state of not feeling. That state of letting the feeling just consume and devour.

Allowing the process is so much different. It's being an active participant in comforting your own soul. Did you know its ok to hug yourself? Did you know its ok to tell yourself sweet things? Sometimes all we do is rail at our inner selves. Rant at our failures and our weaknesses. Did you know you can change that inner voice? Comfort that little girl inside that needs a hug. It's so easy to put that task off on our loved ones. To make it their job to ease our pain. To make it their responsibility if we are sad. It's sometimes why grief can pull a couple apart. The anger at the other not meeting this need for comfort.

Well that's all i've been pondering for now. I know I'm not done with this processing yet.

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