What to expect and how to survive after unimaginable tragedy
“Early grief is largely this -- crashing again and again into a reality that can’t be real.” - Megan Devine
Early grief is a state of complete shock. It’s the period that immediately follows the death of your loved one, not really defined in terms of days, but more by the cocktail of emotions and sensations that take place. Because unimaginable tragedy just happened and fully grasping its magnitude, it’s more than your body and mind can handle. Therefore, early grief is about pure survival. It’s about making it through the day. This is not the time to be thinking about healing or post-traumatic growth. You are miles away from that. This is the time to take care of yourself as best as you can because all of your being (psyche, body, heart) is undergoing a tremendous amount of effort to process your loss and the new reality that you are facing.
Bodily Sensations During Early Grief
After the first few days of crisis management upon finding my partner Alex’s body and dealing with the police, I entered a period of feeling like I was floating through the days as the adrenaline was flushed out of my system. A bit numb. A bit dissociated. A dreamlike state. Letting a few tears out from time to time, but not too many. “I feel like a psychopath. I’m too okay. I can talk about it. I haven’t had nightmares. I haven’t even cried that much. When am I going to fall apart?” I asked my counselor. It didn’t make sense. How could I have experienced such horror and continue to act like it was just another day? There I was taking a break each evening from packing up the house and running errands by relaxing with a show in the company of our cat Nimbus. I would sit down on the couch in the exact same spot where I had found Alex dead, which happened to be not only Alex’s favorite spot but also mine, and then Nimbus would follow by jumping on my lap. I would watch a show for a couple of hours and, as I started to recover my appetite, nibble on the delicious food that people were sending my way. “This is awesome,” I remember thinking, “I don’t have to go to work. I don’t have to do anything. I just get to relax here.” I think about that now and I find it insane. Some people can’t even look at belongings from their former partners after a breakup and there I was, chilling on the couch where I had found Alex dead and sleeping in that house on my own for almost two months. Of course, I felt like a psychopath. But the truth was that I couldn’t really feel much, that the world around me had stopped feeling real, and that most of the time, I was not even sure to be in my body.
Feeling wired and tired all the time. I would go on long walks around my neighborhood to manage the restlessness in my body, the constant need to move despite the exhaustion. A body charged with trauma and full of discomfort, but also a body that started to feel separate from myself, like something that didn’t belong to me anymore. And then I just ceased to be here with everybody else. The world around me felt like it was on the other side of a screen and I was a spectator of this movie called “Life.” Suddenly, I would have the urge to scream at the top of my lungs, cutting my walks short to run back home in case I couldn’t contain myself. But there was never a private space to scream without alarming others, including my sweet cat Nimbus. So I learned to open my mouth and release a silent scream.
Processing Loss in Dreams
It didn’t take long for me to start dreaming about Alex, but unfortunately, he was dead even in my dreams, at least in the beginning. In my first dream, I was walking around looking for him and asking everyone I encountered whether they knew where he was. Someone explained to me that he was gone and that getting in touch with him was no longer a possibility. They never said that he was dead, just gone and unreachable, which had the same outcome. That was my psyche starting to process the idea that I would never get to see Alex again. Once I moved out of the house, I started dreaming that he was alive. Sometimes I would dream that we argue and I would ask myself “Why don’t you just tell him how you feel?” I would wake up and answer out loud “Because he’s dead.” My counselor kept reminding me that, even though these dreams could be very unsettling, they were a sign that my psyche was doing the work to process and heal.
Taking One Hour at A Time
My work arranged for a grief counselor to call me those days and when I shared with her my approach to the situation, she was quick to correct me, “One day at a time is too much right now. You should be taking one hour at a time. Ask yourself, what do you must do in the next hour? And if it’s not urgent, you don’t need to do it at all. Not today nor in the next few days. Give yourself some time.” With her permission to slow down and look after myself, I made eating and sleeping my priority those days and so should you. Your body is doing a lot for you during early grief so you have to support it as best as you can and avoid putting any unnecessary demands on it.
I never forgot her words and as time went by, with the waves of grief and the ups and downs of life, I kept reminding myself that I had the option to take one hour at a time when life felt all too overwhelming: “Just focus on the next hour ahead and forget about everything else.”
Asking for Practical Help
Whenever someone would say, “Let me know if I can help in any way,” I would answer, “I have a job for you.” During the first few months, I assigned tasks to any friend or acquaintance who was willing to lend a hand. Otherwise, I don’t know how I would have been able to pack up the house and find a new home for Nimbus and me. There’s a lot of work to do when someone passes and in your state of grief brain fog, everything might feel like an impossible task so don’t be afraid to ask for practical help and delegate whenever possible.
If you are playing a support role, help your grieving friend survive early grief: Check on them regularly, send them food or, even better, gift cards for takeout and groceries, and offer practical help such as running errands, completing chores around the house, or giving them a ride somewhere. These small gestures of care and support mean more than you can imagine.
When Does Early Grief End?
I wish I could give you a straightforward answer like 6 months or something like that. Unfortunately, the end is not marked by reaching a certain number of days but instead, by how you feel. I remember how much I wanted to fast-forward through the pain. However, I learned that not all pain can be avoided and not all pain is meant to be avoided. There are breaks though. During the first months, five and even six days of the week were bad. Bad as in what I had described here and worse. Yet, that one day a week, and sometimes two, was like feeling the warm sun on my skin after a long, cruel winter. I knew this was my window to fill my tank so I could keep going. But more importantly, these breaks would give me hope that one day I would feel okay again.
I knew I was coming out of early grief when the ratio of good to bad days reversed and now more than three years later, I only have a few bad days throughout the year. Don’t get me wrong, it still holds when they say that there’s no end to grief. The pain of the loss stays with you forever. But that state of constant disorientation and the excruciating pain that doesn’t let you breathe do come to an end. I remember that that’s all I wanted: One day, to breathe with ease again.
I recently read online the following quote in the context of grief: “One day it will no longer be the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning and the last thought you have before you fall asleep.” I think that’s the best answer I can give you as to when early grief ends together with reaching that day when you will breathe with ease again.
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