Two weeks ago was a week. But then, the days leading up to it and these weeks since have also been something.
That something is grief.
I’ve learned a thing or two about it over the last year or so. But apparently its knowledge base is as wide as its pit of despair is.
The day before the one-year anniversary of my father’s death, as my mother and I stood facing the stove top waiting for our two cups of tea to steep, I admitted that as much as it was on my mind and I wanted to mark his life, I’d been dreading the one-year mark. Because as much as I’ve been taught to dread ‘a year of firsts without your person’, I was also able to look back at this time a year ago when he was with us. And now that seal has been broken, his existence wiped off this calendar page.
As if that isn’t bad enough, after a year, that dreaded ‘year of firsts’, I feared that people wouldn’t think about it anymore or my person or my grief. Not like I do anyway. And as much as I hated the checking in and the questioning, its anticipated absence makes his all the more real.
Like a true stupid human, I’m trying to attach a timeline to something that stretches through all of space and time.
And apparently my body knows that.
After my mother and I drank our tea and went to a lovely remembrance mass in my father’s honor, I got upset over the stupidest things, completely unrelated to my father’s passing. I guess I’d reached the limits of my emotional bandwidth. Then I got exhausted. Like fall asleep on the couch at random times and go to bed early exhausted. I had no choice but to go to bed one evening when I couldn’t hold my head up the pain in my neck was so bad.
I thought I was done with it by the end of that week and attempted to resume normal functioning.
By the end of the next, one of the kids shared kisses and a cold, which at times left me shivering and twitchy, which I thought was weird since I didn’t have a fever. A few days later, the same stop-everything-and-close-your-eyes neck pain came back. Lying in bed with my pillow over my legs so my spine could lay flat, I felt that same twitching as I stared at the ceiling and prayed for sleep.
The next day I tried one of the stretches my daughter had DM’d to me the last time my next was hurting. Then I moved to the foam roller. And I sobbed on the living room floor.
Not enough to let it all out. Not even a full release for that day. But for a few hours, my head felt lighter, I didn’t twitch at every movement.
As the afternoon went on and the soreness set in, I tried to guzzle water as instructed after a deep massage.
I still haven’t read van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score though it’s been on my list for awhile. I’ve already learned part of its lesson with tension and holding and release in my own yoga practice. But this tightness in my neck has driven home the point more than anything ever has.
The only good thing about it (said ruefully with an ironic smirk) is that its presence stretching beyond the one-year mark seems to make my previous comments moot.
But then, I knew missing my father was for the long haul.
