Grief Room

People all sift through the feelings and senses of grief differently.  Some people show it, others hide it; but either way, it’s there in both scenarios. There really isn’t much difference in how it manifests in the outward life because it touches every part of life.

I found it, the room that is filled with all the grief I’ve ever known.  I didn’t know that I was pushing it away so much until I found the place buried inside of me.  I sat breathing slowly, deeply on the floor of my room with my eyes closed with my mind open and my heart reaching.  

It’s here that I noticed this place I go when I need to go there.  What’s inside?  Darkness.  There is dim light, just enough to see what’s there.  I see pictures from my husband's funeral, though not just the pictures, but all the words the pictures say too. 

It’s like the pictures, they’re all written over, blatantly describing what is there.  Feelings are falling out of the images. The words are dripping with what they describe. It’s about what’s really happening in the image. 

One picture I see, for example, is me with my children next to my husband lying there in a casket behind us.  That picture shows faces of my family, but I don’t recognize them.  The words that fill the image are: broken, lost, end, fatherless, fear, dreamless, hopeless, insurmountable, left, gone, hurt, directionless, hard, impossible, heartache, pain, lost… so lost. 

The feelings?  They go with each of the individual words and feel even more overwhelming than the thousands more that could describe that scene.  When I look at that picture as a memory inside of me, I realize that it’s kept within this room.

I shut the door of this particular room so that I can walk out into the light of the daytime. So that I can appreciate the sun and know that that room, is somewhere else.  This way I can bask in the light of the sun instead of wither and die without it, if I were to stay in that room.  

It’s the revelation that it’s there that surprised me.  I’ve kept so many things in that room.  They get put there one by one.  When I go inside, I remember and feel all the memories stored there.  I carry them with me but contained in this place, this room within me.  

It’s heavy, yes, but it’s also a place I can walk out of.  I can’t live outside that room and I like it much better outside too.  Some people show their grief all around them. I realized that I place it in a quiet private place, so that the rest of my life can be lived without all that’s in that room getting in the way.  

I honestly don’t know if that’s working for me, but it seems to be the way that I’ve held the deepest feelings. They are in a place that allows me to keep on living life in a way that I can wake up each day and do the normal things, without falling apart from the words and feelings that each moment of grief holds.  

The images of my past and present and future are all there, because grief isn’t something you experience from a past moment only, it permeates every aspect of every moment and so it can just be far too overwhelming for some, like me. 

So putting it away is something that my mind has done for me because it’s always there and because it’s impossible to live without a room that holds it in the house of me.  I guess my life seems to work for me when I can savor and appreciate all that’s in there.