My mother in the nursing home gropes for disappearing words, trying to construct her vision in the empty air with her twisted hands, bewildered that she can’t show it to us there. “I’m afraid,” she finally says. “I don’t know why, but I’m afraid.” I see her cheekbones almost cutting through her shrinking skin where I’ve never seen them before. She covers her face and wails like a child lost in the dark. I see myself in her, and it frightens me, too.
When loss makes its inevitable incursion into our lives it throws our well-planned days into chaos, stripping away the careful cocoons in which we shelter our fragile hearts. In the years I worked for hospice, loved ones of the dying often told me their grief made them feel crazy. Is it so crazy to find sorrow and pain overriding your memory of where you left your car keys, or crippling your usual efficiency? Isn’t it perhaps right and natural to turn your awareness to what you experience in your mind and heart and body as you lose something you love, whether a person, a pet, or a long-held dream?
I don’t pretend to know a way around such pain. Being fully human means having feelings, awful as well as sublime. I do know that a daily practice that deeply relaxes and nourishes your body will make it easier. “It’s hard to feel anxious when your body’s relaxed.” For me that practice is Qigong, for you it may be something different. Whatever interrupts the anxiety feedback loop (brain to body to brain to…) will help you through the darkness and back out into the light again.
I wish you a safe journey.