I was an active participant in my grief for years…but perhaps not in the way one may expect. You see, I found myself in the position of actively avoiding my grief, any mention of my husband, Juan, his family, the hospital where he died and any notion of the enormity of what I had lost. 

As this grief- avoidant individual, my existence was fraught with labored attempts to fend off the pleas that my nervous system and my broken heart made for my attention. When, a year and a half after my husband died, I started showing signs of panic attacks (that ended up being hospital worthy), I sought methods to stop the attacks… but regarded this as separate from my grief...merely coincidental, if you will. The nightmares started, the realization that I could only remember the final scary minutes and hours with my husband, the inability to read, the brain fog…I brushed all of it off as a symptom of the grief that I once felt, and immersed myself in hot baths, cbd gummies and yoga teacher training. Everything worked in a small way, for a little while. Ultimately, when my methods to calm myself failed me, I made social plans or took on another part time job. 

I was diagnosed with PTSD. I felt that the diagnosis was a badge…an official way to explain away any missteps, canceled plans or disappointed people, both to myself and the population at large. I experienced a sense of justice in the feeling that this truly meant that I had been through something traumatic but, at the end of the day, I still felt a sense of other-ness with any notions of traditional grief… in a totally disconnected kind of way. 

Four years after the death of my husband, my grief shifted. Spurred by both the physically grueling medically assisted experience of trying, and failing, to have a baby and a second marriage to a good man whose past trauma struggled to healthily cohabitate with my past trauma, and vice versa, I found myself distressed by the fact that the grief was finally too all-encompassing to continue to outrun. 

As I encountered rock bottom after rock bottom, grief, compounded by more grief over the next several years, I started to find that my primary mental, emotional and physical state could best be described as tired. 

I gave into tired, which also felt like sad and mad, betrayed and untethered. I gave in because I had no choice.  I slept, I wept, some days I ate, and others, couldn’t find the strength to. I binged seasons of shows between naps, almost burnt my house down after falling asleep while I was boiling chicken…I started therapy, I started looking at pictures of my husband, I reconnected with his family, I found somatic breathwork therapy, I made decisions to leave relationships that weren’t allowing me mental or emotional safety, I quit my job, I opened a yoga studio, I became trained in trauma-informed yoga, I walked back into Monmouth Medical Center…I made the choice to stop running from the bereaved woman that I was. I leaned into the only power I discovered I had within my loss…that of my own self-agency.

It felt very very bad…but also…very very good.

It felt like I found my husband again…like I found the parts of me that I had long since bid adieu, and I felt alive…filled with a sense of some control over the destructive evil forces…which in reality are existentially human in nature…that forever altered the world we had constructed together. 

In the remembering of him, I remembered me…the me that I once was…the energy that I once had…the parts of me that existed before the grief of witnessing his physical decline. As is usually the case, multiple things were true. I was no longer that same woman, and that was precisely the woman who was going to help me find my rightnow self. That woman, she was lovingly known as “sparky” or “crazy Morgan”, she was adored, in the purest of ways, by her husband, she knew solace, strength and peace with him, and she could know it again, but this time, finding it outside of herself would be a bonus, not the sole means by which to feel complete. 

I vacillated between looking towards Juan as my north star when it was hard to see my beauty or worth, and independently building my own reserve of loving-kindness. I took my husband’s advice and sought the “busual” (better than usual) life…wearing colors I wouldn’t usually wear, stepping outside of my comfort zone, daring to love myself exactly as I was, infusing more fun and less work (but still a lot of work)...I wanted to live wide-awake, and for the first time since the years before he died, I realized that I was feeling things…everything…not just numb or scared, but pleasurable things, safety, agency, anger, rage, and appropriate sadness during sad times. 

In deciding to mourn, I decided to truly live. 

No longer did I tip-toe around big feelings, live for others, deny my needs or operate from obligation; no longer did I feel that my grief colonized each and every aspect of my life.

Actively mourning the death of my husband, the unspoken fear that gripped me, and us both, from the progression of his illness, the loss of our teenage and young adult years to a slew of serious topics and hospitalizations, my second marriage, the leaving of my chosen career, my infertility…the grieving of the parts of me that I was certain had made me whole…arriving to the practice of noticing and feeling the grief and discomfort related to these parts of me…made space. None of these things have “healed”...I haven’t moved on, forgotten, stopped missing or feeling for…but I have made peace with what has occurred, resolved to feel my feelings, worked hard not to turn away from myself and figured out that doing these things, won’t in-fact, be the death of me…rather… they serve to enhance my own ability to remain connected to who I am now.

You may think that I am sharing this as a cautionary tale…a warning about resisting the ways that our systems protect themselves after trauma…but really, I am sharing this with deep love for the ways in which I managed myself and my life after unimaginable grief. I share it with deep love for you and for all of the ways you are learning to manage yourself after unimaginable grief. I share it to remind you that despite how it feels, we do have continued agency within the loss that we have experienced.