Shapeshifter

The Physicality of Grief

Today, Tyler’s words lead me.

He wrote:

No one teaches you how to grieve. Nor could they.

There is no guide book to navigate the mountains of sorrow or the rivers of loss.

I’ve been here before... but its different every time.

I’ve been in the thick of it lately, and seeking to honor this sacred duty afforded to me.

It’s been tough. My heart aches something vicious.

So I sit in solitude to honor the dissolution of something that appeared to be beautiful, and was in some ways... but ultimately was an illusion.

My ego wants to be productive, to take action, to complete the cutting of the cord at every opportunity…

Yet this isn’t what closes the portal. This isn’t what really helps heal and process the unexpected shift in my reality.

Trust me, I want to seek solace in distractions, in food and substances, and in the body of another. I want to divert my attention away from my vulnerability, from the hard feelings and comprehension that this ending was inevitable.

The only way through, is through. To discover the ritual as it comes. To breath, cry, sleep, write, dream, ruminate, read, eat, walk, pray, play, create, meditate, laugh, scream, talk, wait. To sit patiently as it unravels in mysterious and magical ways.

Grief is a stamp that love existed. Its a pathway of suffering that allows us to transcend and lets love permeate us more deeply as we move forward.

Stories dont always end how you want them to, nor when you expect them to. Just because one ends, doesn’t mean another is about to begin.

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Shapeshifter

No one prepares you for the physicality of grief. No one talks about how you shrink from the edges of yourself, from reality, from the world, from the people still here.

It takes all I have to hold this halfway space sometimes, still. I am a shapeshifter.

I lost almost 15 pounds the month after Tyler died. I became hardened at the edges, foreign from my soft belly, my warm arms, the shape that motherhood made me. Some days it felt as if I was becoming thinner, more transparent to the air, to the reality around me. I walked between worlds, desperately cloying to both sides. It was dizzying really.

Grief pulling me under…

…reality pulling me back.

Everything felt foreign in the weeks afterwards, and my body became the bearer of these wounds. A warrior taking shape against a harsh and unforgiving landscape. I hardened, muscle becoming sinewy. There were not wasted steps, what little energy I had was directed at a task and nothing more. Strong, but not in the ways I ever worked at, pushed towards. This was different. Strong, but hard. Strong, by circumstance, not effort. Strong, and not soft. “Where is the ground?” a rallying cry as I pushed my new muscles against nothing and everything.

Grief pulling me under…

…reality pulling me back.

It is an indelicate dance I am trying to make beautiful. I want my grief to be beautiful. This the the shapeshifting of grief, the dance that lets me love.

Sometimes I shapeshift between moments. Reeling from dream, dripping with the fresh wounds of the night, blood on my tongue, to hold the sweetness of my children’s morning breath as I wake them from their sweeter slumber. I give them the shape of morning, instead of mourning. I hold the routine, everyone on the train to get up and fed and out the door. Some days I settle myself around this: the cacophony of living, of life, of little ones resounding the noise that speaks the hymn of oxygen in my veins. Some days, some moments, my blood thickens and coagulates. Instead of flow, I stagnate. And the sludge

stops

thickens

my grief

my eyesight

my heartbeat

It slows.

My shape, arrested in time.

I have seen and born witness to the ugly ways we humans try to alchemize and process our heavy emotions. I have been injured and scarred by the ugliness and sheer terror of other people’s pain that keeps them under its grip. Talons bared, foaming mouth, the air thick with shame and despair and rage.

I could make this just as ugly, and yet, I want my grief to be beautiful. This will only matter if I do. In my work I see trauma and its reverberating and generational impacts. I try to staunch the bleeding, to name wounds for what they are, the precision of this like a surgeon’s blade. I hold the mothers as they themselves shapeshift. I want her and her baby to know a third way. I write to midwife my grief, to own the shape of it. To give it power beyond what it takes from me. I take my shape back.

I pick up my pen. I pick up my children. I pick up myself. All of these shapes matter. They are all me. They all belong to the me, right now.

Echoing the sweet oracle voice of my brother, “The only way through, is through.”

Here is my ritual. Here is my voice. Here is the shape of my grief and love.