I remember being pregnant and complaining of having “pregnancy brain.”  It’s a real thing and it seemed to “wear off” a month or two postpartum, if I remember correctly.  I remember feeling like a complete featherhead, forgetting things I was supposed to do or where I put things.

It feels like there is a thing that should be called “grief brain.”  

I understood it with all of the chaos after Scott was gone.  There was SO much to think about and decide and do and things to find.  Thank God I had people to help walk me through all of that part.

But the people are mostly gone now.  I’m okay with that.  Most of the time now I would just as soon be by myself and at home unless I pop over to the boys’ house for awhile.  No insult intended to anyone at all but I just have a lot of reasons to prefer being alone at the moment.  

I have only made it through one entire live church service since it happened.  I still find it very hard to say or type the words “since Scott _____ (left)”  And I keep trying to get back to being at church every Sunday but depression has always made it hard for me whenever it has doubled back on me for various reasons.  When I’m in a dark place I know God is there with me and that I’ll be able to look back later and see that.  It’s happened soooo many times before so I’m fully sure that’s what will happen.    But I can’t feel it right then.

I think it’s like when Jesus went into the desert to be tempted by Satan for forty days and forty nights.  He had to rely on His knowledge of God’s presence and His Word rather than the feel of Him.  I’m not comparing myself to Jesus (that’s just analogy) but I’m definitely in the desert.

I make it through part of the worship service and then I feel like I’m going to implode.  The music is always what gets me at church, or in any other situation, really.  It always has been.  I’m not one of the people who see colors when I hear music, a different hue for each note (did you know that was a thing?  It’s called chromesthesia or sound-to-color synesthesia.) But music does evoke very deep emotion for me.  It peels back layers that I’m trying to barricade myself within and touches the sensitive and raw core of what I’m feeling.  

Sometimes it is a whirlwind of happiness and joy.  Sometimes it is anger.  And sometimes it is the deepest sadness, swirling down into a deep drain-spin in the moments between verse and chorus or bridge.  It hits so suddenly that sometimes I cannot catch my breath.  Or maybe I can’t let it out.  But it feels like I’m being crushed into implosion sometimes.  

With worship music, it usually has to do with the fact that I know the promises that the music speaks of.  I believe wholeheartedly that they are true.  But I’m in a vacuum.  Somehow the music reaches me but it feels as if the hand of God does not.  

And the thing is, I know that He’s there and is wrapped like a protective cocoon around me.  I know because I’ve seen this part many times before.  But I’m in such a deep place of hurt that I just want the after part, the part where the pain dies down enough that I’m able to look backwards.  I can’t look backwards…

When my mind tries to go back to that night, all of its own accord, I feel like I want to rip my hair out at the roots to stop it.  I do work to take my thoughts captive and refocus but pieces get through the wall before it’s fully built.  It’s always the absolute worst parts that break through.  Like fractured pieces of a broken mirror where the only pieces big enough to see a reflection are focused right on the biggest insult to your sanity.  Then you slam the heavy door in the wall you just hastily built, lock it as quickly as you can, and stand with your back pressed hard against it while you try to catch your breath.  And you literally cannot catch your breath.  That detail isn’t just a part of the metaphor.

So, rather than implode, the only solution is to break down into a sobbing mess.  And I don’t cry.  Well, I never did cry before.  I may have cried three or four times since I’ve been with Scott, ten years.  Now I’ve cried what feels like it could supply Niagara Falls for a week.  

I tell you about my grief here in blog posts.  I share what’s going on.  But unless you were at his funeral or you are one of very few people really close to me, you will not actually see it.  Public displays of affection?  Yep, any day of the week (nothing gross, y’all.) I’m a hugger.  I’m going to let all of you know I love you.  But public displays of any other emotion?  That’s not me.  

See, when I write on social media so that someone else who is grieving can see it, my hope is just to MAKE something good come from this.  What happened has already happened and cannot be reversed so it 𝘩𝘢𝘴 to have some kind of meaning now.  It has to. 

And when I write here, you can “see” what’s going on but you can’t see it.  Understand?  I can stop seventeen times, or seventy-hundred, and fall apart if that’s what I need to do to get the feelings from the inside to the outside so I can breathe.  I can type while the words are blurry more easily than I can stand and try to see people through it.  I told Scott that I think it was a safety mechanism that formed when I was a single mom and had to keep it together so that no one else got scared.  Now it is concrete.  

So the option, in church or any public place, is to get up and walk out then let it all come to the outside (once I’ve reached my car, or home if I can make it.)  Ugly crying, tears, snot, saliva, whatever is pushed out by the grief behind it that is trying to escape this high pressure situation.  I suppose it exits as more of an explosion than an implosion at that point.  But it’s better than trying to sit through the rest of a service holding it all in and trying to flatten it, keep it quiet, hold it still.  Besides, when I get home and go online for the message, I can certainly concentrate on it better than I could have while trying to force down and compartmentalize everything that was brewing inside.

It’s the strangest phenomenon, how you can look backwards and see God in the rear view after you feel Him beside you again.  In the darkness, you can’t see, hear, or feel Him.  It feels like the same kind of absence as not having Scott here with me every (or any) day.  Vacant.  Devoid of oxygen and movement.  A vacuum.

Afterwards it is so obvious that you were being carried from place to place, day to day, and you can look back and KNOW that He had you.

My brain feels like that.  Like there are cavities, absent of matter or information, that are just scattered throughout.  No synapses are firing in those areas.  It feels as if the electricity has failed and no one has turned it back on yet.

My brain “has a mind of it’s own” now.  Sometimes it’s like trying to drink from a full pressure fire hose processing everything moving around in there.  Sometimes it all just feels blank and words won’t come to me, reminders won’t come to me, prayer won’t come to me.  And sometimes it lets me put a voice to what’s going on, but mostly only in type.

I feel like a bumbling fool a lot of the time now.  I’ll be in conversation and will have to stop to reach for words that are just barely out of my grasp (and usually just have to say “whatever – you know what I mean!) I forget things I said to people, or will remember I said it but just not who I said it to.  I forget to set the oven timer then get distracted and forget about what’s in there until I smell it burning.  I forget something I’m supposed to do and feel like I need to apologize a million times because “this isn’t me.”  

This isn’t me, is it?  This kind of thing only happens to someone else.  It happens in Nicholas Sparks movies.  It happens to people in the newspapers. Not us. Yes, there are days when I know exactly how real it is and others when I just still cannot believe it.  This could not have really happened.  Pinch me, please.

So, if you are grieving or you know someone who is grieving, give grace.  To yourself.  To whoever is grieving.  I don’t know if I’ll ever “be myself” again.  Or if I’ll ever feel like I am.  But I can’t keep beating myself up for failing at this.  I’m giving myself the grace I would give to others if they were living in shoes that look an awful lot like mine.  

Because these shoes I’m in?  I don’t like them and they’re terribly uncomfortable.  I’ve got blisters and sores from them.  But they look an awful lot like mine.