Grief and Health

I'm writing this as I lay in bed home sick from school. It's just some kind of virus, I think. Fever, aches, stomach ache, all that lovely stuff. I've been sick kind of a lot lately. Over the last few months I've had several little bugs, some worse than others.

I really think this trouble with getting sick is related to my grief. Think about times in your life when you were really busy and stressed, and how you got run down and ended up sick. I feel run down every week. And not because I'm busy doing a lot of things, but because grief and mourning takes so much energy every single minute of every single day. It would be different if I could slowly ease my way into life, darting back into the safety of my home to recover whenever I needed it, but unfortunately life doesn't work that way. I have a job and obligations. I'm forced to fake it until I make it. Maybe that's better. Maybe if I was able to crawl into myself and recover whenever I needed to it would take me forever to be able to fully function in my life again. Who knows.

What I do know is that I am not at the point yet where I can tuck my grief away. "My daughter is dead" is the constant loop running in my head. It's heavy, sometimes suffocating. When I'm participating in life, either at work or with friends, those thoughts are rarely ever in the background. The difference now is that I am usually able to wait and mourn in private, and keep "the face" on in public.

As I was writing this the opening scene from Finding Nemo popped into my head. Where Nemo's paranoid dad  pops in and out of the anemone to check for danger. That is how I feel all the time. Always scanning for danger, triggers, that will make things worse, afraid to leave the safety of my anemone. It's exhausting and I think getting sick is my body's way of telling me to stop and take a rest when it can't take it anymore. So, for now, I'm tucking in to recover.