Body Memory

I seriously wonder how much my body has a memory all it's own. When I was 9, my family and I went to Hawaii to visit my dad's family. My uncle was watching all three of us kids and took us to a friend's house with a pool. My older brother jumped into the deep end of the pool taunting me, "I can swim and you can't." Well, I couldn't. But it didn't look that hard and the pool was only 6' deep (never mind that I wasn't even 5') and I leaped into the water. All I remember from that moment was sheer panic; I bobbed up and down trying to gasp air, trying to reach the side (which was maybe an inch or two beyond my reach). It felt like eternity. It was probably only a few seconds. My uncle reached in and whipped me out of the water. Such a short moment. But it seems indelibly burned into the cells of my body. Now, whenever I am in water where my feet do not touch bottom, I panic. I have to forcibly calm my body down and almost chant, mentally, "I am okay. I can swim to shore. I can float. I am okay." It is a very conscious effort to stay calm whereas the intense anxiety seems to be involuntary; a moment where my body becomes a living entity unto itself while my spirit tries to supersede that base reaction.

I bring this up because I wonder about my body now in response to the months of June and July. I have been feeling so anxious of late; you know when you just want to crawl out of your skin. I have been eating and eating and eating unsure why I feel so unsettled. I thought that this was just caused by Robert being absent but, while I miss him, it just doesn't feel true to blame all of this anxiety on him. Tonight I was driving home and pondering life, as I am want to do, and I realized, "This is June." A year ago I was going nuts and was irritable and cranky; nothing made me happy, I was on edge and couldn't figure out why. It was the brilliant and beautiful Lizzie who pointed out, "When did your mom die?" Everything clicked together in that blinding moment of ephiphany.

I had the same moment on my drive and as I realized it, my body sighed. The anxiety comes from it being June. Three years ago, my mother came home from a trip to Seattle in May; everything seemed to be fine and dandy. We had plans to go north for the summer and help her sort out her house. Once she got home, though, she began having "episodes" which were initially declared not to be strokes and finally declared to be strokes - medicine being such an exact science. She was in and out of the hospital. She signed a DNR. I cried at that. It seemed so final, as if the end were just around the corner. Things were going downhill, the shop desperately needed help as Mom hadn't been to work since April, before her trip to Seattle. I used my dad's mileage and flew up on June 28th, two days after we decided to go. My kids' first visit with Nana in I think a year and a half was in the ICU. She had all these tubes coming out of her and Quinn wouldn't go near her. She yoyo'd in and out of the hospital for a couple weeks before they decided they couldn't really do anything for her. She finally passed away on July 26, 2005.

The funny thing is, I'm finally getting to a good place in my grief. I acknowledge that there will always be a hole in my heart; I will always miss her. But, for the most part, I'm not crying until I can't breathe. I finally found my comforting image of her in the afterlife. Really, it's very simple. It's just a picture of her, all in white, with her beautiful smile. She is standing next to Jesus, one arm around His waist and He with one arm around hers. They are both watching me, helping me and smiling over me. It is an image full of love and peace. And yet, even with this new phase in the grieving process, my body still aches this June. My body still remembers the pain, the worries, the anxieties, the stress and the overwhelming sorrow and it acts as if I were passing through a shadow of that moment right now. It's odd to see myself as two separate beings but in this I feel that way; my body is instructing my spirit how to feel and my spirit is following suit. I imagine for the next two months that I am going to feel as if I were suddenly dropped in the deep end of the ocean; that my spirit will be consciously and constantly telling my body, " I am okay. I can still talk to her. I can remember her. She's in a better place. I can float. I am okay."