A Ruptured Space-Time Continuum

Grief in the presence of my husband’s absence — life 21 months after he died.

I’ve been reflecting on this second Memorial day since my husband died; why is it so much harder than the first? I have a few theories, but I think it’s all centered around how grief is processed differently by our bodies and our minds.

We are taught from a fairly early age that every story has a beginning, a middle and an end, which unfold in linear fashion. Even in stories using flashbacks, we understand that there’s a “before” and an “after” something major happens.

Like an inverse relationship in economics, we believe that our feelings and memories, especially the negative ones, become smaller as the distance between past events and our present reality become larger.

I imagined grief would feel like a giant ball of yarn tied to my ankle, unraveling as I walked through life until it was nothing but a straight line behind me. I had no idea the ball would be riddled with knots leaving me stranded by the side of the road, paralyzed as I struggled to untangle them. In many ways I have become more adept at picking them apart, but I am still surprised by the ferocity of my anger and frustration when I stumble upon them.

Jet lag, another great analogy for grief, is described by the Mayo Clinic as, “A temporary sleep problem that can affect anyone who quickly travels across several time zones. Jet lag occurs because your body’s internal clock is synced to your original time zone. It hasn’t changed to the time zone of where you’ve traveled.”

Your body feels like you’ve climbed a mountain when in reality you’ve been sitting on your ass for several hours. It’s not just the amount of time spent traveling, but the distance in miles/km that leaves you completely depleted. You become confused as to where your body belongs in relation to space and time.

Proprioception, otherwise known as kinesthesia, is our body’s ability to sense movement, action, and location. It lets us touch our shoulders or our nose with our eyes closed, or take a step without looking where to place our foot in front of us.

Grief feels like randomly jumping back and forth between time zones. My body and my mind feel forever out of sync, both with each other, and within time itself. While my husband died 21 months ago, I remember the details of that day as if it were yesterday, and yet sometimes it feels like he never existed at all.

My brain struggles to make sense of his absence while my body remembers every detail of his presence. We are meant to believe we’re made up of energy that can never be created or destroyed, but there’s such a feeling of lack, of loss, an emptiness, a void, a chasm, a black hole threatening to swallow me alive, where he just used to be.