The internal grief clock (a poem for compassionate witnessing)
I wrote this poem in the summer of 2021, a raw 5ish months after my mother’s passing (Feb 19th). This expression explores and puts words to the quiet hardening that often happens as any anniversaries or important dates approach when living with grief and loss.
In my experience, grief can can creep up or come on suddenly, and now almost a year later the way it makes itself present in different than when I wrote this, but my body remains powerfully synched with my internal grief clock.
I have learned, and am still learning every day, to treat my internal grief clock with deep respect, honoring, and sacredness, even when my mind tendency is to want to bypass this process and overcome it.
For me, Grief is a never-ending initiation into softening and surrendering yet again, into opening and listening yet again, into feeling with my whole heart and body, even though protective patterns in of my mind want to keep me from the potential pain.
My hope in sharing this poem and experience is to extend compassionate witnessing and holding to others experiencing deep grief of any kind, as well as space and love to invite the sacredness back in to your process.
Today I grant you an invitation to tap in and listen to your inner grief clock, and remember, there is nothing wrong with you no matter how you feel your grief today.
The Internal Grief Clock
Like clockwork
Even when my brain doesn’t realize it
My body can feel it.
The heaviness comes
The helplessness
The numb, dull, stay-in-bed depression.
This again?! Grief is this you?
I can’t even feel the answer.
Everything feels so dark
I go searching for every other reason I could feel like this, yet again
Disconnected
Hopeless
Stuck
Dead inside.
I see the date on my phone - the 16th, not the 19th
It mustn’t be grief this time, I think
It must be me.
No matter what I do
Here I am again.
The next day passes, and then the next
Glimpses of light and lightness
Moments of feeling alive again, but mostly
I am constantly weighing how to move through the day, what I can muster the energy for.
Until I can’t fight it anymore, and I roll over and stay in bed
Surrendering to the nothingness
To the missing motivation
To the missing desire.
Then I see that date again
The 19th.
I ask again, could this be grief?
At first I shake my head, but then
The tears begin to fall
My voice returns, and I can
Speak my thoughts and fears.
I miss my mom
I talk to her
I call my sister, text my dad
I tell my husband it’s been 5 months.
I ask him if it feels longer or shorter to him and he replies
“Some days it feels closer, and some days it feels further away.”
And he is exactly right.
On the 19th she feels so close, yet so far away all at once.
On the 19th’s and the days leading up
My body remembers first, even when my head can’t connect the dots
And there is nothing to do or change, even when it doesn’t make sense.
Then the 20th comes, and I feel
Half human again
Half alive again
Able to breathe again
Hungry again
Awake again
Able to move again.
And everything still hurts
But it all somehow looks brighter too.