Confronted by the milk

unpacking time and trauma in the body

Everyone knows for those in grief, the holidays suck. I held my breath until Christmas was over. I made it through, getting back up each time grief visited. I even had some fun and meaningful moments in there. I cannot consider this a form of victory though. No victor here.…just keep feeling what arrives. Rinse and repeat. Grief gets boring. I wonder if it is boring reading about it? I might be saying the same thing repeatedly, and for this I apologize. But what am I to do? This is grief. Always there, close at hand. A forever sidekick evoking iterations of pain. At the very least, I hope I am using a variety of different words to bring my experience to life.

I looked forward to New Year’s, historically one of my favourite celebrations, and not surprisingly, I wanted to send 2023 as far away as possible although that was confusing too. Jason was here in 2023 and won’t be found in 2024. Do I really want to enter my first year without him? Don’t worry, it’s a rhetorical question.

Nevertheless, I attempted to send 2023 away with my New Year’s Party (Fuck Right Off 2023). This was fun, full of good connection and imbued with several meaningful rituals. However, 2023 got the last laugh as around 11:40pm a stomach bug descended upon me. I ended up puking my way into 2024. As I lay on the bathroom floor, I sighed and shook my head in disbelief. Some suggested it was a purging or maybe 2023 simply ensuring I remembered it right to the bitter end (no pun intended). Yeah, trust me, I will.

And then January – swept back up in work, a beautiful and powerful women’s ritual retreat on Bowen Island and the freshness of snow, turned to slush and now disappeared, in true BC fashion. For the past several weeks, I have been acutely aware of February lurking just around the corner. My body tightening in response. Then I remember the instructions from my physio, that I am supposed to be focused on the opposite, relaxing and softening my muscles, and not holding my breath or my body in a state of tension anymore.

I am currently getting physio treatment for tendonitis of my right inner thigh and hip flexor muscles. My physio and I think this overuse injury is a trauma response to Jason’s death, from a perpetual holding and gripping. This makes sense to me. The night before Jason died, I had been worried about him. I woke at 4am to find a strange text, out of character for him, that he had sent me the night before, about twenty minutes after I had shut off my phone for the night and gone to sleep. I carried that worry to work, trying to focus while waiting to hear from him. He reached out that morning and upon hearing his voice and his reassurance that he was indeed “safe and sound” I audibly exhaled, I relaxed…and then, before I knew it, in the space of that exhale, he died.

I think my brain decided right then and there that relaxing was dangerous. I needed to remain hypervigilant, in case more awful things were going to happen. Hence the holding and the gripping. It was many months before the awful squeezing in my solar plexus softened. It felt like a tight fist was lodged there. At times I wondered if I was having an aneurysm of my abdominal aorta. For several months I also had uncontrollable tremors that originated in my hips and pelvis and shook their way right down through my legs and body. This was unnerving, but I had to let them move through me. Eventually these stopped too. I had no idea that grief would do this to me. Take over my physical body in such a profound way. Profound aches and heart pain. Exhaustion. Insomnia. Digestive troubles. Panic.

It is amazing, but not surprising how trauma and grief take up residence inside the body. The body does not forget. As Bessel van der Kolk, trauma expert and psychiatrist notes, “the body keeps the score.” Trauma impacts both the brain and the body, therefore the answer to healing also lies therein.

One of the first and only things that gave me any comfort initially was the free Reiki sessions offered to me by a volunteer at my local hospice. I would arrive a mess of tears and devastation and that wise woman would kneel in front of me, hold my hands, look directly at me with her intense blue eyes and tell me that I would be okay. That we were going to let the pain move through me. Then she would do her magic which sometimes meant channeling Jason or my ancestors with messages, while she worked to clear my chakras and rebalance my energy. It was an appointment that I clung to from one week to the next because I noticed I felt better afterwards. I am forever grateful she showed up on my path to support me.

Most recently, I have been engaging in a much less pleasant treatment with my physio, IMS (intramuscular stimulation). I have had this many times before for various soft tissue injuries. However, these treatments have been more intense, painful and emotional than usual. My physio has been dry needling from the tendons high in my groin down along each of my inner thigh muscles to the bony territory of my inner knee. These muscles are exceedingly tight, full of trigger points that when needled send jolts of nervy pain through the entire muscle. Any massage evokes a tearing and burning sensation. I have been trying to breathe my way through these intense sessions, knowing I need to witness and follow this pain in order to let it go.

So back to the date, the impetus for holding. I have been pushing the thought of February away. I am not ready for that. February 15^th. One year. 365 days since you left. Time is so weird in grief. I recently learned about the two Greek conceptualizations of time, chronos and kairos time, that are helpful to consider.

Chronos time is the way we divide and measure our lives quantitatively in increments. It is the time of watches and calendars. It ticks us into our future. In early grief, I was hyper focused on this time, acutely aware of each painful second, each minute, noting each passing day as they formed the first week, the second week, the third week…and on and on. Counting and counting. Time stretching out in front of me in a cruel and heartless way; All the time ahead I would have to live without him. This thought induced panic in me. It seemed like a life sentence of pain. I wanted time to pass more quickly. I was holding out for the promise that the pain would shift and change. Somewhere along the way I stopped this incessant external time keeping because I discovered it did not account for my insides. It didn't help me make sense of my grief and if anything it was carrying me away from Jason. The passage of chronos time doesn’t actually heal our wounds. We have to heal them.

Grief, and healing, I have discovered exists on kairos time. Inner time. Qualitative time. Moments of awakening and being in the present moment. It is “deep time” when the world stops. The time of connection to our emotions.

Elizabeth Harper Neeld speaks about the relationship of kairos time to grief…

“Kairos time refers to the time within which personal life moves forward … (it is) a deepening process that results from our paying attention to the present moment, a process through which we are drawn inside the movement of our own story. Kairos is an ordered but unmeasured kind of time outside space-time …The amount of calendar time it takes to reach integration in our grieving is determined by our own kairos time… The mere passing of days and weeks and months and years does not within itself bring integration of our loss.”

So although chronos and kairos time co-exist, they don’t line up in any way that a heart and mind can understand. If anything, they create confusion and a disorientation as one desperately tries to place one on top of the other. A endless time warp of longing, stretched out over seconds, minutes, hours and days. Others on the outside often judge us by chronos time, not realizing we are living on a different clock travelling in a different dimension. On a very personal, inner journey.

I was at the grocery store last week. It was chronos time that snapped me back into reality. It was the carton of milk. The expiry date stamped on milk now read February.

It is close at hand. Tomorrow even. I cannot avoid it.

I feel everything,

everything inside me sliding,

sliding into February.

And the world spins madly on…

Grief is love turned into an eternal missing…It can’t be contained in hours or days or minutes. - Rosamund Lupton

Here is one of my favourite songs that Jason sent to me and lived on our shared playlist…World Spins Madly On by the Weepies.