What To Do When Your Grief Comes Back Like a Sneaker Wave

Learning to ride it out

Last month was hard.

Before I consciously remembered the anniversary of my father’s death, my body remembered.

My husband walked in on me folding laundry and quietly weeping. He asked what was going on. I shrugged.

“I don’t know. I’m just really sad. Don’t try to fix it.”

Then my back started hurting, and I tried to ignore it.

My husband, who has spent over twenty years with me going through these funks, knew where my special belt was in the way back of the closet. It’s black Velcro that I wrap around my hips and helps stabilize my core when I can’t do it on my own.

Since my first significant loss at 17 when my mother died, grief has always closed in on my physical body, especially my back.

My husband doesn’t necessarily make the link to grief… he makes the link that his wife is about to fall apart in a wordless, dark place that he can’t reach.

Also, it’s a practical problem: left untended, I’m apt to get back spasms that render me immobile.

So I Velcro myself together and cry at random, awkward times until the grief wave passes.

This time it took a month.

Less Than Ideal Strategies for Handling Grief

What I want to do: drink vats of coffee, sit on the couch all day, devour all the sugar in the house, pour extra glasses of wine in the evening, and isolate.

I stop doing the things that bring me joy like going outside or reading thick books, and instead get stuck in my head.

My gaze shifts to everything I don’t have or can’t do: give my parents a call or ask them over for dinner or have them pick up the kids.

Last month, an old friend of my parents reached out on social media and asked how they were doing. She was heartbroken when I briefly explained the trajectory of their lives.

I left the experience feeling both terrible to have given my parents’ friend bad news, yet grateful to learn new details about my parents lives.

I hadn’t yet turned the corner, so I also felt cranky towards my mom and dad. How long do I have to make these kinds of awkward declarations and sit with other people’s disbelief?

Grief Lasts More Than a Year

The people we lose follow us across our lifetime. Our relationships with them are not static, but evolve as we filter through memories and gain new life experiences.

And so, long after the first year, we are still figuring out the duality of their ever-presence in our hearts, with their very real physical absence in our lives.

I said to a friend a decade after my mom died, “I can still feel my mom’s love and I know she would be proud of me, but she will never come over to hold my baby or watch the kids while I work. She’ll never give me advice or mother me as an adult.”

Besides my little black belt, this is what I did to pull myself out of my funk…

The Survival Guide for When Grief Comes Back Like a Sneaker Wave

1.) Affirm the grief.

It doesn’t matter how much time has passed since your loss or all the work you’ve done to pull yourself back together. Grief is a marathon. You never get to see the person in the flesh again. You are learning to live alongside absence. It’s hard and ongoing, and sometimes, even when (or because) life is really good, the absence flares in your heart.

Grief needs to be acknowledged before it will lessen its grip.

2.) Drink a lot of water.

Seriously. Tears don’t come cheap. Emotion is draining. Fuel up.

3.) Get outside.

I make myself walk. I find trees offer a lot of comfort. My dad walked every day and sometimes I can almost feel him with me. If I can’t handle people, I can usually handle trees.

4.) Connect with people.

But also… even though grief makes me want to be alone, I still make myself connect with people. I went with a group of moms to a bonfire. I didn’t tell them my heart had cracked opened (again). It just felt good to be around other women’s warmth, talking and feeling the force of life moving onward.

5.) Stretch

My back hurts because that’s where I keep my tension. The same stretches that worked 20 years ago when my mom died still work. I touch my toes. I take a long, hot shower and stretch my hips.

Find the places where your tension takes residence and give them attention. If you cry while you’re doing it, then you’re probably doing it right.

But there’s no right/wrong. If you feel blank, like you’re going through the motions, that’s okay too.

6.) Connect with the people who know.

My dear friend called and checked on me. She explicitly said, “It’s that time of year. How are you?” I was honest. I talked about what grief looks like in year six. I talked about how unlearning a person from your life is an ongoing process.

I called my counselor to see if she had any cancellations. She did. It felt so good to unburden myself without worrying about making other people carry my grief load.

She reminded me there were only a few more days left to the month and that I would be okay.

Guess what? She was right.

I feel like I should give a couple citations. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross defined five stages of grief, and while they’re helpful, they’re also a little underwhelming and incomplete. You can find more about them in this CNN article.

The books Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers by Hope Edelman are insightful and give context to how premature loss shapes our lives, and even shapes how we parent.

The links I gave will take you out of Medium, but are worthwhile sources.

If you are grieving, hold steady. Every grief looks and feels different, has its own timeline, and its own requirements. There is no right or wrong way to grieve. And every grief teaches you something different.

Want to get an email from me every time I publish? Join my email list by clicking here. In a world full of so many words, thank you for taking the time to read mine. Here are some other stories by me: