When you feel like you’re dying of grief

I distinctly recall times in my earliest significant grief the bodily sensation that I was dying, so bad was the felt pain I was experiencing.  I was sure that the stress of it would kill me.

Yet it obviously didn’t.

I remember the dread of a hope that was no more, and how that made my heart feel overwhelmed with tension—yes, my physical heart, not just the metaphorical heart.

I recall my mind hurting so much that I felt tortured between the ears.  Those agonising thoughts at the death knell of a life coming to an end.  Those thoughts that loop and circle around and seem to have no end.

Then there was the tension that coursed through my body, stiff muscles around the neck and shoulders, the sore back, and weary knees.  Grief’s depression made me feel aged.   And then there’s the foreboding sense that there’s no will nor energy to do anything.

The grief that’s experienced because of loss—loss that cannot and never will be resolved—takes a person to these ends that seem to promise or threaten the end.

Why do I write like this?  Perhaps for the reader to know a little of what someone’s going through in their grief, because if you’ve never been there, it can be so hard to empathise, because you may not understand.  If you say, “Well, of course I understand!” please consider that if you haven’t grieved, you may think you’ve got an idea, but perhaps you can’t fully understand because you’ve not had the life experience yet.

I pray you never do, but chances are you will.

Pain from full-blown grief seems to take years off your life and it certainly leaves you greyer.

But I think what it more fully shows is that our bodies and minds are much more resilient than we give them credit for.  What I suffered didn’t so much debilitate me forever, and it certainly didn’t kill me like I thought the stress of it would.

More the issue is how it shows us how we can survive these extended seasons that can last years.  Only as we look back from years after do we see that what threatened to shorten our lives actually left us with a legacy of respect for our Maker who gets us through the pain one day at a time.

In the final analysis, we’re much stronger than we realise.