The Grief of Now

 

When you’re in the throes of awfulness you can’t think about tomorrow.  You’re in the powerfully crippling feelings of the moment.  And that needs to be attended to.  For it’s in the going through them that you will come through them to a new phase.  But it takes time, patience and work.   Wounds must begin to close up before the new layer of skin appears.

 

I couldn’t get myself to take my year-old daughter to the park.  It was too painful for me to see other younger babies with their heads straight and their little hands swiping at the mobile attached to the stroller, while my daughter’s head wobbled, her eyes crossed and her hands lay at her sides.  She was beautifully docile with a smile of ease and contentment and a body that lagged behind in hitting the basic milestones of development.

The balloon burst, the bubble popped, normality was shattered upon hearing the neurologist confirm my fears, that yes, there was something wrong.   She had a rare neurological condition, a fluke of development or lack of, that had occurred in the first trimester in utero.

My intense grief began and my mantra of “why me” reverberated against the walls of my shrink’s office week after week.   Session after session, I poured out my deepest feelings of pain and sadness.  And hour after hour, he held them.   He leaned forward and in his beautifully soft voice, he reassured me over and over how normal it was to feel what I was feeling.  There was no talk of tomorrow; there was just the here and now and the immediate grief I was feeling, along with his safety net of normalcy.

Giving voice to our pain eventually loosens its grip on us.  Its toxicity lessens and we start to have periods of lightness and ordinariness.

It’s a rough road.  We need someone to hold onto, who’s with us in the presence of our pain, as we expose our deepest wounds and reveal our most vulnerable selves;  who also lets us know, as some of the clouds start to shift, that there is a better tomorrow.

 

We can all live a richly engaged life – despite, through and beyond. 

Harriet is social worker specializing in helping people cope and grow through their adversities.