Grief, Toil & Healing
Fatigue grips me
Exhaustion in my bones.
Yawn.
I'm in the fog of disrupted sleep.
Dull weight in my chest
Breath -
It's gone.
I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, and my body isn't protesting.
There's peace and purpose in this fatigue.
I am on the right path.
Christmas was hard. There was so much pain and grief – I couldn’t just bounce back. I needed rest – so much rest.
Deep rest – depressed? Depressed; it sounds so clinical. I’ve struggled with depression for most of my life, up until I was 28, when I felt the veil lift. Will it come back? I’ve been afraid that it might – lingering anxieties that tell me every time I’m sad or emotionally exhausted that I’m once again inside the clutches of depression. I’m not.
This winter, I thought I was back in that place many times – the desperate position of near helpless darkness I’m so familiar with. We experienced loss this winter, and the grief hit me like a bus. It took me a while to connect that my grief isn’t synonymous with depression; my grief wasn’t even spiralling into depression, and that what it needed was deep rest, profound quiet and inner connection.
Getting through depression was one of the most harrowing journeys I’ve ever taken. Now, it feels very normal to think that depression is so often pain expressing itself in ways that don’t fit our cultural norms. A clinical problem? Not always.
Are we depressed as often as we think we are? Or have we forgotten how to describe our emotions and allow ourselves to experience ourselves in whatever state we’re in, be it loneliness, melancholia, desolation, mourning or grieving? Don’t misunderstand me – depression is very real and must be acknowledged – but so do the states I’ve just mentioned. I believe this type of language is essential, even more so when we’re looking inwards for healing.
I’m deeply privileged to be in a position where I could rest, work in the garden and play with fibres while releasing my business to lay fallow – toiling with my hands and allowing my body, mind and spirit to calm as we shifted, shifted and settled. The work has been healing in ways that allowed my grief to continue through life. It’s been just over four months since Jeremy and I lost our first pregnancy, and only now is my body returning to not a “normal” rhythm but a normal-for-me rhythm. A rhythm that matches my energy, my shed grief and the healing this season of rest has gifted me.
Imagine a world where deep rest was prescribed, where grief was universally supported, and communities were in place to provide time, peace and nourishment – tonics of love and restoration. Imagine a society honouring the uniqueness and complexity of each individual body and the wisdom of our moons.
Four months.
Four lunar cycles.
Three normal-for-society menstruation cycles.
One normal-for-me moontime.
Without the stresses of covid, moving our homes again, and reworking our budget to accommodate financial strain, I imagine it may not have taken so long. Our bodies are wise – we can trust them. Our bodies take into account the varying stresses in our lives, tallying them up and providing us with a neat little receipt each month. Or not – demonstrating that we have not yet reached equitable homeostasis through our four quadrants of health: mental, emotional, spiritual and physical.
Reality isn’t quite so neat or tidy. My lens of healing is my own body – and the process of learning to and allowing myself to grieve has brought me that much closer to it. The signs my body provides may not mean the same thing for other bleeders. The prescription of deep rest I’m imagining includes the education necessary for self-observation, learning from our own bodies, and developing inner trust.
We cannot provide each other with cookie-cutter advice; we are not carbons of one another, and we bleed and don’t bleed through a spectrum of possible rhythms. What we can offer each other is space, honouring our diverse processes of healing.
We can provide gentle guidance as we step into ourselves and malleable recommendations on where to begin knowing that we don’t carry the truth for each other – but that we can help one another reach our own as we share the wisdom of how we got there.
The work is never done.
Those words haunt me and inspire me in perfect symmetry. So long as I have a body, I am learning from it, balancing the heart-mind connection and working through the pollution that keeps me from experiencing the truth of who I am and what I’m experiencing – be it grief or any number of emotions.
For now, I’m holding this vision of what our communities could offer. With each reader, each client, and each colleague in this journey who can visualize this same reality, we bring it one step closer – learning from our personal and collective experience.
My body sags, Sigh. I feel the tears build - relief filling my body. The waves of grief are not so powerful now, and there is room for other things.
