When Grief Doesn’t Just ‘Get Better’: A Stubborn Reality
The sharp, white-hot jab shot straight up from my little toe, through my shin, and lodged itself right behind my eyes. I cursed, not loudly, but with a visceral, internal explosion that felt like it cracked a window somewhere deep inside. It was 4:37 AM, and the unyielding corner of the coffee table, a relic of an ill-advised mid-century modern phase, had once again claimed a victim. I hopped, one-footed, in the dim pre-dawn light, a ridiculous silhouette of pain. That kind of sudden, absolute pain, that demands your entire focus, obliterates everything else, even for just a few moments. It reminds you of being alive, raw and exposed. And it reminds me, June J., of how we often try to process other kinds of pain, the invisible ones, with the same frantic urgency. “Just move past it,” we tell ourselves, or worse, we tell others. As if grief were a stubbed toe that simply needed a minute to stop throbbing.
Pain Subsides
Echo of Love
It’s a peculiar human expectation, isn’t it? This societal pressure to neatly package sorrow, to file it away into a forgotten drawer labelled “closure.” We’re obsessed with timelines – the 7 stages, the 7 days, the arbitrary 7 months when you *should* be feeling better.
.jpg)
