Wednesday's Woe - Walking through Molasses…

Wednesday's Woe

Walking through Molasses…

~Tommy Prince

There's a loneliness that only exists in one's mind. The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart and all they can do is stare blankly."

~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

In Child-Loss Grief, it seems as if we are now going through life as if we were walking through molasses. Going through life like you're walking through molasses, you have to expend added energy and effort to do anything now. With Grief in the foreground of our hearts and minds, it takes twice as long to do anything else. Or even if our grief can be pushed briefly into the background of our hearts and minds, it still takes twice as long to do anything else. It's as if our bodies know what our minds temporarily may forget...

The other side of it is, don't even think about saying, "Hurry up!" There is no such thing as "Hurry up!" now; I can't hurry up and do anything. We can't hurry through a store: If I do I'll lose my train of thought, or I'll even forget where I parked. If I do try to get into a hurried pace, it seems I'll lose my place: I won't know where I've been, and where I'm going. I have to go slow. 

It's like the procedural memory in the brain (where routines and habits have been formed such that we can function on auto-pilot) is stressed out. In our Grief, and especially if something else comes along to upset one of us, we'll find that whatever we once performed automatically by habit, will now be done either incompletely or out of order because it seems nothing can be done perfunctorally any more, without our complete focus on it. 

And what we know now about Grief is that it consumes most of our energy, whether our Grief is conscious or unconscious. Our lives have changed forever whether we know it consciously or not, for it seems Child-Loss Grief takes on a life of its own… now and always...

Picture, thanks to http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/vintage