*Please note, this blog contains content about trauma and suicide and therefore may be activating to some readers.*
The calendar says today is December 3, 2024 but the whole of my being says otherwise. It tells me that today is THE DAY even though the date doesn’t match, the day of the week does. And that is the trauma talking. For me, it will likely always be the first Tuesday in December, regardless of the date, when the memories of Greg’s death, Tuesday, December 7, 2021, come flooding back in one way or another.
2022 was the year of painful numbness. I remember very little of that entire year, despite the large amount of hugely eventful things that occurred. I rely on my journals, planner and, oddly enough, FaceBook memories to coax my mind to retrieve what happened from day to day in 2022.
2023 was quite similar but the numbness started to wear off and the fog began to dissipate. There weren’t as many big events in 2023 but still, external sources are my go-to for kickstarting my actual memories.
2024 has been different. This year, my body has been running the show with my brain pulling the levels behind the curtain like some sort of sketchy being that doesn’t want to be seen. I “thought” I was handling things pretty well until my body informed me otherwise. Like a kidney stone episode that coincided with a very special date for Greg and me. Then a self-induced injury that kept on giving, and now today, in the wee hours this morning, a health episode that woke me up quite rudely, serving as a reminder that the first Tuesday in December is here.
So what is at work here? Trauma. As some of you know, Greg died by suicide and I found him. The trauma of finding him is the mechanism for many things that are going on within me. Several years before Greg’s death I had read “The Body Keeps The Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D. and I found it fascinating. I’m so thankful my first reading occurred at a time when I was clear headed and not in a traumatic crisis. I read it again after Greg’s death and I refer to it often to help me get a handle on what I’m experiencing. I highly recommend this book and I also want you to know that it’s not an easy read, but well worthwhile. There are two paragraphs at the end of Chapter 1 that are key. I’m not going to include them here in their entirety, but will provide these 3 portions: 1) “…trauma is not just an event that took place…it is also the imprint left by that experience on the mind, brain, and body.”; 2) “Trauma…changes not only how we think….but also our very capacity to think.”; and 3) “…the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.”
My entire being is still processing everything that happened on December 7, 2021 when my world was obliterated. And yes, I have done and am doing many things to help me with this, including professional counseling and therapy, which I started almost immediately after Greg died.
As I will discuss in the next part of this series, I realized that I had gone through a particular part of this experience previously and that is when I circled back to “The Body Keeps The Score”.
