Lost in grief

Last summer I worked in a refugee camp in the remote mountains of Thailand. The goal of the research project I was running was to understand mental health and coping strategies of the refugee population and ultimately to deliver a tidy report to those paying my salary. 

In the process of wandering around and discussing mental health with the population there, I was brought to a small bamboo shack deep in the isolated jungly part of the camps. There was a woman sitting on her platform made of bamboo. There were no walls and only a roof made from thatching large leaves together. This was her home. She was wearing a beautiful handmade skirt in bold black, red and white that she had made with her own two hands. She didn't speak but sat and rocked, not even looking up when we joined her. I was told by my translators that she had lost all of her family during the terror inflicted on those in Burma. She had experienced so much pain that she was a frozen person. She could no longer move or even just be, she could only rock. 

If she had yarn, she would weave colors together to make a pattern. She lamented in barely audible burmese that the weaving was her only comfort in life but she had no yarn. I imagined the extreme predictabiliry and control involved in taking each string and putting it in its place. Making sense in an otherwise senseless world. I sat there aware that this was what extreme emotional pain looked like. Embodied. I arranged to have yarn sent to her. I did this because intelectually I knew it was the right thing to do. I however could not deeply empathise. At the time I had never experienced emotional pain that was anything more than a surface wound. 

For the past four months, I have become my own version of this rocking woman. I am aware that divorce and the pain of watching the man that I spent my whole life with starting a new life with someone else compares little to loosing your whole family. But for me this is the pinacle of my own personal emotional threshold. 

I am not lost to the jungle, not totally consumed by it and my own grief like this woman. I still go about my day. 

But last week while buying shampoo in the super market I suddenly felt seering pain in my chest and broke down with tears flowing freely. My ten year old son comforted me and said "let's just get home mom." 

The loss of my family as a whole complete unit, the loss of someone that knows me and loves me anyway, who accepts me after everything. This loss does impobilise me for long moments in my day. It stops me in my tracks. It inflicts real physical pain. It takes away my ability to breath. 

Four months have passed since I floated down that jungle river in Borneo crying uncontolbly as I sat company with fresh loss my broken family still in tow. Since then the tears and pain has been unquantifiable. Deeper and greater than I thought possible. After years of no emotion and no tears this grief feels like an infected pimple that burst letting out all of the built up puss of the past. In this way the pain hurts, but also has no choice but to come out. 

Grief is something that you can either let pass thru you or consume you. The burmese woman I met had long ago been consumed. Like a stone statue that had been overgrown she was lost to this grief.

I now have to find a way to let the grief go. Let it pass theu me. I have to find a way to not be lost in this grief stricken jungle. I have to walk out of the forest and look at the sunshine.