The body is an amazing thing. The way it can heal after you injure it, then have a doctor cut into it and alter the way it was originally built, is awe inspiring.
I have had to be patient, but I am seeing the healing process working! I began physical therapy yesterday and today I walked nearly a mile after doing the exercises they prescribed for me.
What is a bit harder to get my head around is another kind of healing- the healing from grief. It isn’t as cut and dry. There is no set of exercises that will steadily make you feel better about things. While my physical healing has those moments when I fear a set back, mostly I am moving slowly in a positive direction. Grief moves all over the place.
I’ve definitely noticed how different grief feels for each person that you lose. Losing a friend is automatically different than losing a parent or in law. Each individual and the relationship that you had with them, your feelings about them, makes things different.
Knowing that you deeply loved someone, admired them, truly knew them well, is different from when you are unsure of the relationship you had with them and where they were coming from. If you had a strained relationship with them, it makes things easier in some ways and much harder in many others.
I tend to wonder what I could have done, what I should have done in every misunderstanding I have with anyone. I try to examine where I went wrong, what I need to do better next time, if I can fix the part of the estrangement I was responsible for.
No disagreement is one sided. I realize if I have a problem with someone, if someone has a problem with me, I am at least partly responsible no matter how righteous I might feel.
What makes reconciliation difficult is when the other person doesn’t see that. When they think most everything they do is justified. When you reach out again and again and they will not reach back. When everything is on you, and when they see your feelings as invalid.
It makes for a tough road when every time you try to talk, you leave in tears and the other person never even notices. When you feel wrecked by every encounter and the other person simply moves on.
And then that person is gone.
With no resolution, no clear path forward, it is hard to grieve. Furious one minute, indifferent and guilty the next, sad for the situation at one turn and thinking maybe everything is your fault at the next turn. Crying for what never got said, angry for what was said.
Our bodies are amazing- they take time but they eventually heal enough for us to continue on. Our minds seem to take a more winding path and sometimes I think never really heal completely.
I have a scar on my back, right at my waist, that Tim and the doctor and the physical therapist have all said has healed up nicely. Probably someday in the not too distant future that scar will be hard to even see.
The internal scars we carry around from our childhood, from our lives as we grow and get older, are not so quick to heal. Wounds that got opened again and again over the years feel like they will never get the chance to heal. Sometimes I worry that they will never soften into marks we can barely see or feel any longer.
All we can do is try to do our best- feel the pain when it hits, cry when the tears won’t go away, talk to those who do listen and understand us and hope that even if it never completely heals, at least we figure out how to live with it and move on.
