Holding the Unthinkable: A Mother’s Journey Through Grief

Entry four: The Aftermath in My Body

There are moments in grief that don’t feel like feelings at all. They feel like weather moving through the nervous system. Like a storm that doesn’t pass overhead - because it’s inside you now. The world keeps its shape, the clock keeps making its unreasonable demands, people keep speaking in full sentences… and yet everything in you has been fundamentally, violently rearranged. You are still here, but the “here” you knew is gone.

In the immediate aftermath of losing my daughter, my body became the first narrator. Before I could even find language, it spoke in alarms. It spoke in shock. It spoke in pain. I didn’t just feel grief - I wore it, I swallowed it, I carried it in my muscles and bones like a second skeleton made of lead.

Sleep when it would actually happen - stopped being a refuge and turned into a trap door.

Because the second I would wake up - before I even opened my eyes - there was that brief, fragile half-second where my brain hadn’t caught up yet. That tiny merciful space where I didn’t remember. Where my body floated in the illusion of normal. And then it would happen: the reality would slam into me like a door kicked open.

Boom.

It would rush back in all at once, not as a memory but as a catastrophe re-happening. The kind of knowing that doesn’t land gently in the mind - it detonates in the chest. The kind of knowing that makes your stomach drop like you’re falling and falling and there’s no bottom to reach. Waking up wasn’t waking up. It was being thrown back into the nightmare of being alive in a world where she wasn’t.

I started calling them grief attacks because “panic” didn’t feel like a big enough word. Panic sounds temporary. Panic sounds like something that might respond to logic. This was different. This was my body insisting - over and over - that what had happened was impossible, and therefore I must be in danger, and therefore I must not be able to breathe.

It was like my lungs forgot how to do their job.

I would be trying to inhale and it felt like there was no room inside me - like grief had filled every inch of my rib cage and there was nowhere for air to go. My chest would clamp down, tight and crushing, as if the world had put its hand around my heart and decided to squeeze. I would cry so hard it felt like my body was trying to escape itself. There was nothing graceful or contained about it. There was no “processing.” There was only survival, minute to minute, breath to breath - if breath would even come.

And then the pain - the full-body pain that no one explains to you when they talk about grief like it’s only sadness.

My whole body hurt from head to toe. Everything ached, everything was sore, everything felt bruised. It felt like I was covered in invisible injuries - like the inside of me had been thrown against concrete. Like I had broken bones no one could see. Like every muscle had been clenched for days without permission to release. Even my skin felt tender, like the world touched too loudly. The simplest movements felt impossible, as if grief had pulled all my strength out through the soles of my feet and left me hollow.

People talk about grief like it’s an emotion.

But in those first months, grief was a physical state of emergency.

It was my body trying to make sense of something that made no sense. It was shock refusing to fully wear off. It was my nervous system firing flares into the dark, over and over, because it couldn’t find her. Because love is not just a feeling either—love is a map. Love is your body expecting a certain presence in the world. Love is your cells recognizing what “home” is. And when that home disappears, your body searches like an animal searches. It paces. It cries out. It panics. It collapses. It tries again.

Everything else became too big.

The smallest tasks - things I used to do without noticing - turned into mountains. I couldn’t break anything down into steps because my brain wasn’t working in steps. It was working in fragments. I would stare at the simplest choices and feel my mind blur out, like it was slipping underwater. A glass. A phone call. A shower. Food. Words. Time. Everything was too much, and nothing mattered, and everything mattered, all at once.

I don’t know how I functioned in those days. I truly don’t.

I remember people coming and going like scenes from a movie I didn’t choose. Faces, voices, questions, hugs, condolences - each one arriving in a world that no longer had gravity. I nodded. I answered. I existed. But it was all a blur, because my body was elsewhere - locked in the moment where everything broke, replaying the unthinkable on a loop, trying to understand how a mother can still be breathing when her child is not.

And that’s the part no one prepares you for: the surrealness.

Grief isn’t just pain - it’s unreality. It’s waking up and realizing the rules have changed but no one gave you the new instructions. It’s living in a world that looks the same and feels completely wrong. It’s the mind refusing to accept what it knows. It’s the body rejecting the truth because the truth is too large to hold.

In the immediate aftermath, coping isn’t something you do well. It isn’t something you do neatly.

Coping is something your body attempts while your heart is shattered.

Sometimes coping is simply making it to the next hour.

Sometimes coping is remembering to drink water.

Sometimes coping is letting yourself cry until you can finally pull one full breath in again.

Sometimes coping is sitting on the floor because standing is too far away.

Sometimes coping is being held up by other people because you cannot hold yourself.

And if you’re reading this from inside that kind of grief - if you’re in the earliest days, where your body feels like a haunted house and your mind feels like it’s constantly being ambushed - please hear me: you are not “going crazy.” You are not weak. You are not broken beyond repair.

Your body is reacting to an unthinkable loss the way a body reacts to the unthinkable.

This is what it looks like when love has nowhere to go.

This is what it feels like when a mother’s entire system is trying to survive the impossible.

And in those days, I didn’t need anyone to fix it. I didn’t need silver linings. I didn’t need timelines or lessons or “at least.”

I needed truth.

I needed softness around the rawness.

I needed permission to be undone.

Because the immediate aftermath of losing her wasn’t a chapter I lived through - it was something my body endured, something my breath crawled through, something my soul staggered through one trembling moment at a time.

And somehow - somehow - I am still here to write this.

Not because it got easier.

But because minute by minute, breath by breath, my body kept choosing the only thing it knew how to do:

Keep going.

---

Gentle note to readers

This entry speaks about end-of-life decisions, parental grief, and trauma. If this brings up overwhelming feelings or thoughts of harming yourself, please reach out for immediate support.

In Canada, call or text 988 for 24/7 mental health support. If you’re elsewhere, local crisis services or trusted support can help you through the moment.