Finally Some Good Grief 3.
call my body match of the day the way its keeping the score
TRIGGER WARNING: This newsletter will contain descriptions of anxiety attacks, death and medical stuff. The last thing I want to do is trigger anxiety attacks in someone else, so if that sounds like you, maybe leave it for now. However if reading that stuff may make you feel less alone, go right ahead.
I am becoming obsessed with the body. Of course, in the way like every young woman who grew up under diet culture, fretting over the social currency of my aging, imperfect body, but more so, the tangibility of it all.
After months of being with my uncle, we finally received Mum’s ashes. The picture first appeared on my phone as I sit down at the pub, three boxes tucked in a backpack. I felt like someone has just winded me in public but conversation carriesdon as normal and I found the absurdity of the situation means that the words to describe this situation became stuck behind my lips. How do you tell your friends that your mum is now sitting in the bottom of a bag? After all, their mums can’t. The vertigo between my life and theirs made me feel like I’m floating away, hanging onto any conversation by one slim thread.
From that moment onwards, I thought of the dust often, when I walk to the supermarket, when I cook dinner, when I try to sleep. When I thought about the translation of the person I knew, with thread veins on the apples of her cheeks, to grey, inanimate dust, I felt sick.
I went to the doctors. I had just finished working a temporary job, so decided to immediately treat myself by booking a doctors appointment to address the nagging feeling in the back of my mind for the last month. It had started on the hottest day of the summer. Despite drinking endless water, I didn’t just feel too hot, but if I wasn’t careful, I felt like my head would explode like a cartoon boiler when the pressure valve goes. However, it was early in the contract and I couldn’t afford to lose a day’s pay or potentially the whole contract, so I went to the bathroom, frantically towelling myself off with wet tissues before laying on the floor with my feet in the air and hoped for the best. I survived that day, just about. As it got cooler, I breathed an inward sigh of relief. However, I then starting noticing something weird.
My heart would start beating obnoxiously hard and fast. I would get random pains in my right arm and chest. Often pins and needles too, in my hands or my arm or my face, My lips would suddenly completely dry. I would then have to go to the bathroom five, six, seven times in quick succession. If I even just the slightest bit of a caffeinated drink, it would set me off for an hour. After making the mistake of drinking a large iced tea during a screening of Materialists, I felt on the verge of passing out for about two hours to the point I had to get one of my friends to buy a bag of fruit pastilles.
It feels pathetic to admit this stuff. Partly because I spent so long looking at myself trying to figure out which obvious mistake I was making. I cut out caffeine as that felt like an obvious perpetrator. I’ve never been a big caffeine drinker, but I used to be able to at least have one normal cup of tea and be fine. I was even starting to quite enjoy an iced matcha latte (yes, I’m one of those white women). But whatever progress I’d made has been deleted, like someone had pressed a factory settings button inside of me somewhere.
People told me that I was fine, it was probably just anxiety. They say it with the same tone and same knitted brow and I know they are trying to reassure me, I think in particular that they are trying to tell me that I’m not dying of cancer, which I appreciated. But I couldn’t say it reassured me that much either.
I’ve had anxiety before. Anxiety is often depicted in exactly one way, which is the “character is heavy breathing while saying I can’t breathe” version. (The most recent version I’ve seen is Season 1 of The Summer I Turned Pretty, where Conrad has one over hiding the fact his mum has terminal cancer. And yes, it did make me cry, obviously). And to be fair, that is the version I had pretty early on. However, I’ve also had the “can’t physically stop shaking” version. I’ve had the “instant and frequent diarrhoea” version (the glamorous one that no one talks about)! And sometimes just the ‘nothing in your body feels quite right’ version.
When I had CBT for anxiety and depression years ago, it was about what you could do to change your situation and your feelings. And it worked when I didn’t like my job. But there isn’t anything you can do here to stop someone you loved from being dead. It just keeps being your reality. And occasionally, when you do forget, and her being alive seems too vivid, you have to remember.
I remember the feeling of my heart racing the moment I realised this was the moment my mum dies. There was no heart rate monitors like in TV or film, or a dramatic moment when someone rushes in and tries to rescuscitate. It was just watching the gentle pulsing in her neck slow and disappear. There was nothing else to do, except say something you hoped would be vaguely reassuring.
I arrived at my auntie’s house, where the three boxes of Mum awaited me on the desk outside the bedroom. I picked one up, felt the weight and then I tilted it. I hear the sound of the dust moving, some pieces larger than others, a human rain machine. She used to listen to the sounds of rain to help her fall asleep. When I return to them in the evening, I cuddle one of the boxes to myself and cry, until my Auntie gently prises her away and puts her with the drinks cabinet (where she’d like to be, to be fair). I feel strange, like when someone takes your toy away as a child. As awful as it is to experience, it was nice to hold something again.
I flew back home. I left the ashes behind for now, so not to carry them through security. My life returned. My calendar filled up. My blood tests were normal. I booked career events. I had an appointment with a heart clinic, where they strapped a monitor to me for 24 hours. I realised its been a few days since I cried about Mum at all. I wondered about the gaps getting longer.
And then I saw a video of Tig Notaro reading a poem by Andrea Gibson, Tincture.
You can read it in full here, but it’s about the concept of the soul missing the physical sensations of the body after somebody dies.
The soul misses what the body could not let go—
what else could hold on that tightly to everything?
What else could see hear the chain of a swingset
and fall to its knees?
I cried again.
My mum was ready to die in that moment, because pain was all she knew at that stage. I know there is a possibility that that day will come for me too. So when I experience these symptoms, it’s hard not to take them as a potential omen that the day I fear is coming for me, and coming for me way sooner than I would like.
But part of me knows that at least some of the sensations I am experiencing is just the sadness and the shock of my mother’s death haunting my body with phantom feelings. Some of them are just a sign that in the wake of this, I need to take care of myself more. And some of them are just signs of life itself.
This poem reminded me that we are not alive without the experience of the visceral. This week, I went for lunch with some friends and afterwards we got an soft serve in a waffle cone, despite it being November. We walked down the street, and I felt some kind of rush. Perhaps it is the childlike joy in licking the cold cream, despite my fingers already being freezing. Maybe it’s just the sugar. But either way, it was a significant moment of true, simple happiness which I didn’t realise I had been missing for so long.
I have an appointment with the clinic on New Years Eve to talk about the potential secrets of my heart. In the meantime, I will try to relish in my life, whether it’s spice burning on my tongue, the chill of the winter wind or the sting of tears while in the warm embrace of a loved one.
I am here, experiencing being alive now, and that’s all I can hope for.
That’s all for this edition - I decided to separate my usual food roundup as it didn’t feel right for this piece, but I will be posting my autumn recommendations hopefully in the next week or two. Also as your girl is back to jobhunting around the Christmas period, if you resonated with my work, you can chuck me a quid or two here :
However I understand things are financially tough for a lot of people at the moment, so one of the most useful things you can do for a writer is share their work! So please feel free to share on social media or pass onto any friends who may need it.
And finally, as I always say, if you relate to anything in this newsletter, I’d love to hear from you. One of the hardest things about grief is how lonely it is.
Otherwise, I’ll see you all soon.