Coping with loss is a key part of wellness. And I don’t think I did a particularly stellar job of managing. (Most of us don’t.)
I am writing this today because in a perfect world, my dad would still be around and we’d be celebrating his birthday. Instead, he departed this world just over two weeks before his birthday, 14 years ago.
Grief has been a tough challenge for me, given my desire to be seen as a badass. I didn’t want to admit that I wasn’t functioning well. At all. Because of this, I shoved it down. I hit the gym for my usual workouts. I took up Muay Thai and boxing and Filipino martial arts so that I could hit things in a socially-acceptable way. I started a new business – the first-ever Rock Steady Boxing chapter in the Pacific Northwest — so that I could combine these passions with a way to help people with the Parkinson’s that had taken out my dad (alongside lymphoma). This helped a little to assuage the nagging guilt about feeling that I could have done something differently to help my dad, even though they didn’t discover his lymphoma until Stage 4 — challenging for even younger people, much less someone in their 80s.
Throughout this time, I was seeing a therapist who specializes in Healing from the Body Level Up, that combines somatic and talk therapy to dig deep to deal with trauma. But even so, I wasn’t willing to face the fact that all my frenetic behaviors were a way to avoid really thinking about and dealing with the loss of not only my dad, but my mom two years later. I think that like everything else in life, we don’t take things on until we’re good and ready, even if stuffing down our feelings is impacting more than just our mental health. For me, the choice, maybe even need, to be Superwoman, contributed to HPA axis dysfunction a.k.a. adrenal fatigue. Even though I was at the gym training others and doing my own sessions hours every week, and eating clean, I was ballooning in size and perpetually exhausted. More than five years into therapy, I finally opened up to the impact of denying my grief and am on a path to heal mind and body.
If I had to go back and coach the previous me, I would have told her to SLOW DOWN. Given my propensity for Tigger-ish energy, I know that wouldn’t have been well-taken. But I would have shared with her that without self-care, her body would rebel and leave her without the energy to function in everyday life, much less soothe her soul with the snowboarding and cycling and other other movement that served as her church, keeping her more-grounded even in the most-stressful times.
Does any of this resonate?
- Take care of yourself. If you’re early in the grief process, look for your local hospice: Even if you haven’t used their services, you can often be part of their support groups, to interact with people going through the same types of things, with coaching from a professional.
- Sleep when you need to. No one wins, especially yourself, when you don’t allow you body and mind to recover.
- Eat healthy foods. You may not have the motivation and/or energy to cook. Seek out restaurants with healthy offerings and/or shop for groceries like precut veggies, so you have one less item on your too-long to-do list. Are the above options optimal in normal situations? Not necessarily. But grief is different. Give yourself grace.
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