Tell Me the Truth About Loss by Niamh Fitzpatrick

Author:Niamh Fitzpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gill Books

CHAPTER NINE

GRIEF IS PHYSICAL

While I would have expected to experience grief emotionally when it came to Dara’s death, I was taken by surprise at the way it impacted me physically, at how my body responded to loss. Perhaps because bereavement grief, especially following sudden bereavement, hits in a unique way, I had no prior experience of the physicality of loss. It hadn’t attended those earlier losses of infertility and marriage breakdown to the same level. In the moment when I realised that I would never be a mother and when it became apparent that my marriage was over, physically I just felt hollow, there was no other response from my body other than an infinite sense of emptiness in my chest. On reflection I can see that I did have a physical response to both losses over time, but in that moment of impact all I felt was hollow. My body responded very differently to the loss of my sister, however. Reflecting on bereavement grief, I think of it on two physical levels: how grief impacted my body at the moment when I heard that Dara was dead; and how I have experienced the physical impact of loss in the weeks, months and years since her death.

The first thing I experienced when I heard that Dara had died was a bodily response: my heart immediately felt heavy, my breath seemed to catch in my lungs, my stomach sank like a stone; it was a body blow, an actual physical impact, a visceral reaction. It seemed to me that I felt the emotional pain of loss in my physical body even before I had uttered a word or had a thought to express that pain. The physical experience of grief was instantaneous, a combination of fright, shock and grief.

Any death will bring a grief response, but a sudden death may also bring a shock response, where the body moves into the Fight, Flight or Freeze mode as the sympathetic nervous system is activated in the face of the traumatic news. Neither loss is greater than the other, it is simply that anticipated loss and sudden loss are different in nature and may therefore evoke different responses. Of course, each situation is unique and the individuals involved are unique, so someone hearing about the death of an elderly loved one who has lived with a terminal illness for a long time may still experience shock when the news finally comes and reality hits. But in the case of a sudden death, when there is no time to prepare, it is understandable that the body responds to such horrifying news in the same way that it responds to danger: a surge of adrenalin powering up our physiological and psychological systems, readying us to deal with threat. In the instance of traumatic loss, the threat is not to our physical but to our emotional survival. In those first seconds, both the fear and the enormity of the loss are overwhelming. We are staring into the deepest darkness of the abyss, and it is utterly terrifying.

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