Talk Without Speaking

Don’t believe the devil
I don’t believe his book
But the truth is not the same
Without the lies he made up

One of the more useful things that the grief counselor showed me was this medical model of grief; it was an illustration of how much energy one might expect to have over a given (quite long) time line. In the immediate days of loss you have no energy, nothing to expend in any other endeavor that is not simply making it to the end of the day. In the weeks and months following, your energy returns. There is still a massive part of your energy that is being sucked and eaten up by grief but gradually gradually some element of life returns.

34 years of habit kicks in and I start actually living my life again. Part of me looks around, shakes my head, and says, “where the hell have I been for the past 5 months?”.

Don’t believe them when they tell me
There ain’t no cure

And, as I think about it, I think what happens is that the grief changes too. It changes from being this horrific, hostile, foreign monster than attacks at will to something that you simply carry around with you all the time. I mean, you don’t think of your right arm as being hostile, do you? I think of grief as being akin to an arm or a leg – it is simply a part of me now and far far less foreign. We are, indeed, incredible creatures; our ability to grow used to anything pretty miraculous (and I don’t mean that in a universally good way).

And all this means that one is to be excused if you forget. You forget that you are wounded. Hell, you *want* to go back to way things were so you tack on this, you add that. You start doing more, taking on more. That extra energy makes you think that it’s all so possible again. And then you get these reminders that you are pushing it when you should be holding yourself in your arms and taking such very good care of yourself. You should be taking it easy and pampering yourself – hell if you can’t do it now when *should* you do it?

I am tired. I have been pushing it. I have been skiing, I have been working, I have been kayaking, I have been storming walls and I have been swimming the last 13 out of 14 days. My body is starting to say, “whoa, buddy…where the hell did this come from? ease on up”

Don’t believe in the 60’s
The golden age of pop
You glorify the past
When the future dries up
Heard a singer on the radio late last night
He says he’s gonna kick the darkness
’til it bleeds daylight
- God, Part II – U2