Grieving the loss of a loved one is a very personal experience. Just as no two people will handle their grief journey the same way, no single person will react the same way to two different significant losses. Our reactions are based on many varying factors such as the nature of our relationship with the deceased, age and manor of death. As is true with any life-altering event that shows up in our experience, our ability to cope with it in healthy ways depends a lot on how "healthy" we are to begin with.
Speaking from my own experience, I can tell you that in the early days of my first grief journey I felt a lot like I had just fallen overboard and everyone on the boat was clamoring around the railing reaching out and yelling things that I could not "hear", yet no one offered to toss me a life preserver or pluck me out of the water. One minute I was engaged with my surroundings and the next, I had sort of "checked-out" or gone deep within as everything around me seemed to fade into the background. At times like these, it felt like I had slipped beneath the waves although there was something quite comforting and peaceful about those moments. Even then I recognized that those moments served a good purpose. They gave me brief periods of time where I became numb to the pain. I could only allow so much of it in at a time.
Then there are the other times were everything in my perception seemed bizarrely distorted. Sounds were too loud, smells that never bothered me were now offensive and I startled easily, like a shell-shocked soldier just back from war.
My mind was blown, as if the brain had short-circuited, the connections fried. I would stand face to face with a woman who was my neighbor for the past 15 years, whose children ate in my kitchen and slept in my house all during their youth, yet still not be able to recall her name or even where I should know her from. It's a very disturbing feeling, one of loss of control and downright frightening at times. But is there a way past this? Is there anything that can help us in those early days?
Finding the Eye
