Jan 21

Jan 21 Let’s get physical

I’m just not that special, I’m just not that special, I’m just not that special. Big sigh. Ok, I can do this (why is this one so hard to share?!). So, I’ve written a lot about the emotional and mental aspects of grief - these are what people think of when grief comes to mind: depression, anxiety, listlessness, guilt, etc. But there is a physical side to grief as well and for all my knowledge of my own mental health I had not anticipated grief’s effects on my physical health and certainly not on my physical appearance.

The week before Adelaide died I slept in her bed every night. Not because I needed to necessarily, she was hooked up to machines that would alarm and we had night nursing most nights. I just desperately needed to spend every last moment with her that I could.

By that point we were basically waiting for her to die - another thing folks don’t talk about, choosing to let a loved one go vs. having them taken from you - but that’s a blog post for another day when I’m finally ready to share the details of those last few weeks with her. The ONLY saving grace of those days was that she was still with us, other than that they were basically torture. I can think of few things worse than anticipating an excruciating loss and knowing there is nothing you can do to stop it. To the extent that in the blurred hours following her death, mixed in with every other emotion, I felt more than a tinge of relief.

I’m detailing all of this not to stir up your own emotions or to drum up pity, but to set the emotional grieving stakes just prior to Adelaide’s death and immediately following. We can vaguely anticipate our mental response to this level of stress and grief but the physical response is far less predictable.

According to a 2019 article in Psychology Today, grief can effect all twelve of our body’s systems, but most commonly effects our immune, digestion, cardiovascular and nervous systems. There is a reason we use words like gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, numb and shattered to describe grief - it can quite literally do each one of these actions.

During my research I also learned that the physical effects of grief, not so dissimilar from its close cousin stress, can ignite inflammation.

Oh, joy.

Which brings me back to that week before Adelaide died, when one morning I woke up in her bed not able to open my eyes. No, I did not have pink eye and I had not been crying so much that they just swelled shut. It was an inflammation response that would sporadically occur again and again over the following year, each time lasting several days before my eyes would return to some sort of normal - a little faster if I used some of Adelaide’s left over steroids which I definitely did not hide from the hospice nurse who took all of Adelaide’s more potent medications with her when she left…

As obvious as it may seem in hindsight, it took me months to realize this was all triggered by my grief and not some ill-timed skin care blunder or new sporadically occurring allergy. Knowing that I hadn’t somehow brought it on myself helped, more importantly though, it pointed me in the right direction for a specialist that could help.

Another fun fact for the day: the physical effects from grief are most likely to exacerbate pre-existing conditions - for me that was skin sensitivity and allergies. With the help of an allergist I was able to finally get control of these reactions, however, even to this day if I don’t take the right combination of medications I can feel the burning itch on my eyelids return. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the right treatment before the inflammation response forever changed the shape of my eyes - one now opens just a little bit less than the other.

I go back and forth between drowning in vanity and accepting my new appearance. I try to think of it like aging or a scar, but other days, when I’m tired or the pollen count is high and the difference in my eyes is more pronounced, it’s harder.

Look, in the grand scheme of facial differences this one is petty, I know. By no means am I suggesting otherwise. But I’m also aware that there are probably others out there that have experienced something similar. Some chronic physical ailment that shadowed their grief upon entry before making a play for the starring role.

This is my attempt at acknowledging and owning the remnants of my physical grief, as superficial as they may be now, while hopefully, giving space for others who have also experienced a lasting physical grief response. These enduring physical effects are just as real and legitimate as the emotional ones. They are not in our heads and they are not our fault. As heavy as grief can be it only makes sense that our minds would need our bodies to share the load.