What does it FEEL like?

What does it feel like to be a mother who has lost her baby? To suddenly be chosen against your will as the bearer of something so unbearable? You can't imagine, right? Neither could I. It feels confusing. It feels achy and nauseating. I often feel clumsy and out of focus. I'm tired and irritable. Sometimes I'm angry. I'm always sad. I feel like what I imagine that mother orca felt as she carried her dead calf around the ocean for 17 days in 2018. Shocked. Desperate. Lonely. Disintegrated. Separated. I wish I could ask her how she finally let go.

And then there's grief itself.

In trying to describe grief, I am reminded of a very kind very elderly woman I once knew who, when asked what it felt like to turn 90 replied crassly, "like shit."

Grief feels like shit.

I teach childbirth education--well I used to. Besides feeling like shit, the actual grief kind of feels like contractions. Coming in waves, rising to a peak, and then eventually subsiding before mercifully releasing me. Sometimes it leaves me in a heap on the floor, other times it sets me down more gently. These grief contractions don't end when the job is done because grief never ends. These grief contractions definitely last longer than a minute, at least right now in this stage of "early grief." And these waves of grief don't bring me one step closer to my baby. There's definitely no way around them, only through them. But there's no prize at the end for all my hard work.

But grief, like birth, is a labor of love because grief and love are two sides to the same coin. It is in my grieving for Owen that I am able to feel my deep love for him, and in turn in my loving him, I am forced to grieve him. I cannot call my love for him into my mind and heart without also feeling grief; they are inseparable. Think about it...imagine your child and how much you love them. It might even make you smile. I cannot imagine Owen that way without also feeling the loss. If I deny my grief, if I try to make it go away, then I won't be able to feel my love. As much as I wish it wasn't so, this love and grief now coexist together, forever waltzing in the halls of my heart.

Sometimes when I acknowledge my lovegrief in this way, I can extract something from it that feels...better? Not better, but bigger. It feels a bit like an expansion of the grief into something more purposeful (after all, what's more purposeful than love?). And again, I am reminded of birth contractions which also lead to expansion. In these moments when I feel this way I wonder, am I healing? I don't really know what healing feels like yet but I'd say for now, it feels more like I am integrating rather than healing. I am no longer trying to make my grief go away but rather to learn to live with it, to integrate it fully into my life.

But it still feels like shit.