No one ever tells you how grief affects every minute of
everyday. Even in the moments when you’re
not lying in a puddle of tears on the bathroom floor, when you seem to be functioning
as normal, it’s there. It permeates the
mundane and it clouds the brain in a way that’s hard to understand if you’ve
never experienced it. It’s as though my
brain is constantly full to the brim.
Thoughts of P are either flooding in, memories playing on in my
imagination like a film; or I am desperately attempting to fill my mind with
other things in order to push out the constant aching, longing, heart wrenching
thoughts that repeatedly play like a broken record. It’s as though grief is this big hairy
monster lurking behind me and I keep trying to run away from it, hide from it,
smile in its face or scare it off with my laugh. But nothing works. So I attempt to drown it
out with NOISE. The noise of the TV, the
radio, sounds from a busy city, café or gym....
I have become overwhelmingly afraid of silence. So much so that when any well-meaning person
suggests that meditating might do me some good I become enraged. ‘I don’t want silence! I can’t handle
silence!’ and I feel myself tip dangerously close to a panic attack at the
thought. Even as I write this I have the
TV on quietly. Just loud enough to stop
myself from engaging with my thoughts, but quiet enough to hear myself think.
This existence is frustrating though. It stops me from being able to focus fully
and I find myself making stupid, careless mistakes. Like the other night, when I selected my
on-line grocery order to arrive tonight.
I am going out of town tomorrow.
And I forgot to take off some of the items I had already managed to pick
up in town. So I will not only have one
pack of baby plum tomatoes slowly going out of date, I will have TWO. Not the end of the world, I hear you
say. And I hear P say ‘you used to make
many more big mistakes when I was around’ (I routinely booked the wrong train
home when we first started dating).
These little mistakes used to send me into a flood of tears in the early
days, when I first began to realise that P was no longer around to fix my
problems. Now it surprises me. I’m so busy running from the Grief Monster
that everyday things catch me off guard, like being thumped over the head with
a bat. No matter how much I try to cram
my brain full of other thoughts,
grief will find a way to manifest itself somehow.
What frustrates me most of all is that I have this desperate
desire to change my life, to make something of myself, to make P proud. But the Grief Monster seems to be holding me
down, and I can’t seem to figure out how to move, how to make things
happen. It takes me hours to get out of
the house and ages to make decisions.
After the sky dive I felt like I could do anything I wanted, but what do
I want? My brain is so full I can’t seem
to hear my heart. Or perhaps all my
heart wants is P so it’s pretty hard to hear anything else.
Whatever the answer may be, this week I am going to try to
endure the silence a bit more. That
said, I’m turning the TV off now. Or… in
an hour or so….
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