Claudia's Blog

A grieving body and mind
 

I’ve always thought that grief is an emotional thing. And while I know that mind and body are connected, my grief has shown me just how much. I’m not writing this because I’m complaining. I’m sharing because I previously didn’t know how grief manifests itself physically and I find it interesting and noteworthy. 

When Amber was declared dead after the accident, I was in physical pain. My insides hurt. It felt like I was stabbed in the chest. I held my heart because it felt like it was going to break. I hoped I was having a heart attack and would die right then and there. But I wasn’t. My heart kept beating steady and strong, it just hurt like hell. I know understand why people used to think that the soul and its emotions were located in the heart. Because that’s where it hurts. It hurt so bad, I wanted it to stop beating. But it didn’t. 
Somebody held my hand as I sat down and held my heart and felt the pain. I physically felt my heart breaking. That’s all I felt for a long time. 
I realized a few days later, that I must have bumped my leg, either on the moving ride or when I fell down, because I had a bruise.  But I never felt that. 

Time ceases to exist, when your child just died, but eventually I realized I was in shock, because I started shivering and not even the blankets (one of them a thermal one) could keep me warm. 

The following days, even weeks, I was exhausted. I slept for ridiculous long hours and had no energy. I was drained. I couldn’t eat. I wasn’t hungry. My body was too busy grieving. 

After sleeping too much came a time of just not sleeping right. While in the first weeks, I would just drop dead in bed as soon as I laid down, I would eventually avoid going to bed. When I laid down, my thoughts would wander, I would start thinking about the accident. So I stayed up until I was about to fall asleep on my feet. Still, I often wake up during the night. I don’t have good dreams. Even though I mostly don’t remember, I feel exhausted and stressed when I wake up. Sometimes I manage to sleep half the day, but still, I am not refreshed when I finally decide to leave the bed. 
My therapist has now given me a sleep diary and some strict guidelines (nothing I didn’t know really, but sometimes it helps having someone tell you what to do) to get me back on track. I hope I can do this, because my sleep habits right now really interfere with university and just life in general. (I was about 3:00 at night when I wrote this, so I’m not following the plan very well…)

When I am emotionally upset, my stomach gets upset. I think it has always been that way. It took weeks for my digestion to get somewhat back to normal. Often, it still isn’t. A solid poop makes me happy nowadays. ;-) 

I can see my grief when I look in the mirror. My skin is breaking out. It is dry and flaky yet constantly greasy. Lotions and potions don’t seem to work anymore. The skin underneath my eyes looks like it has aged 10 years. I was looking forward to happy wrinkles in the corner of my eyes; now I got sad and saggy ones underneath. 

I have noticed that my hands are shaky. This seems to get better. But let me tell you: plucking eyebrows with trembling fingers sucks!

My brain doesn’t function right anymore. (Or, for my fellow psychology students: I am cognitively impaired. ;-)) 
Memory: I’m still missing some time from the accident. There’s a few seconds I just can’t remember. I also seem to have forgotten other things. For example, Amber and I often watched Pretty Little Liars together in the weeks before her death. When I went back to where we left off, I could not remember what had happened in the episodes before, even though I knew I had seen them. I had to go back at least 5 episodes. I’m also very forgetful in general. I forget conversations, meetings, the answer to a question I have asked just a minute before. Sometimes I ask Eddie the same question 3 times within an hour. Sometimes I know I had asked the question, but just can’t remember what he answered. I’m constantly fearing that I’m forgetting something. 
Speech: I noticed I am more often looking for words. And that’s not like I feel I have the right word at the tip of my tongue, it’s just not there at all. (A pretty frustrating sensation…) There’s also more mispronunciation when I speak, like the feed between my mouth and my brain is messed up. 
Concentration: I often tune out and lose my train of thought. 
Time: My sense of time is still messed up. Often, I don’t know, where all the hours go. It’s hard to keep track of the date (I could have sworn it was actually 10 days earlier than the date on my computer…) and the weekday. 

Of course –since grief seems to have a lot of parallels to depression-, there are other impairments as well:
Motivation: I just don’t have any at the moment. Everything takes a lot of effort. Everything. 
Energy: My energy levels are super low. I ride elevators a lot now. 
I have also noticed an increased startle response, which just annoys the hell out of me for several reasons. 

So, in addition to the emotional grief, there is a mental and physical side as well. This makes everything a little harder. It’s like my body constantly reminds me that I’m not well. (Not that I need reminding, really….) 
On the other side, on an intellectual level, it is oddly fascinating, to experience how emotions are not just abstract but can change our mind and body. (If you turn that thought around, our physical self should be able to change our emotional self. There actually is empirical evidence that exercise helps with depression. And personally, the man who held my hand, while I held my heart gave me more comfort that the emergency psychological help (Notfallseelsorger) who showed up later. )
  
A body is more than a mere vessel. It is connected to what goes on inside of us. That’s why, when the soul is grieving, the body is as well.