Motion Sickness

One thing came up recently in talking with a friend of mine and trying to explain what some of this grief process is like. I found myself comparing it to the phenomenon of motion sickness, especially when people get it in things like movie theaters. As I understand it, what happens is the brain ends up getting conflicting messages. The eyes say that there's motion going on, that we're moving (especially if you sit close to the big screen and it takes up most of your field of view). However, the inner ear (among other things) says to the brain that we're actually sitting still; no motion is taking place. The brain gets those conflicting sources of data, doesn't know how to reconcile them, starts freaking out and expresses its displeasure through the stomach. Thus, for some people, sitting too far toward the front of a movie theater means that, along with the show on the screen, they get to deal with gastrointestinal pyrotechnics as well.

I've recently been finding something similar going on for myself. In the last few weeks, I've had a lot more of the positive memories from our marriage coming up. They're not big things. They're not major events, like anniversaries or birthdays or her graduation. They're the little, day-to-day things that added up and meant so much. Things like going out for breakfast almost every Saturday morning for the better part of a decade. It was time we set aside to just hang out with each other, no talk of bills or chores or errands allowed. Things like walking in the park together, and sometimes feeding the ducks. Yesterday it was remembering doing yardwork together, especially pruning back the rosebushes, and how well we worked as a team and made it enjoyable for each other. A huge one was how it felt to fall asleep next to her, just enjoying knowing that she was there.

One of the biggest shifts with that is being able to feel some of what those times were like again. I'd had a few memories like that come up in the last couple years, but most of the time I couldn't feel what'd made them good. I could recall it intellectually, but the emotion was just grayed out, at best. Now I can remember how just sitting at a table and holding hands and talking made me smile. I can remember how walking in the park and talking, usually about nothing big or heavy or serious, brought a sense of contentment with it. How I would drift off to sleep with a smile in my heart because I was there next to this woman I'd fallen in love, that I'd tied my life to. It's not the full intensity of those feelings, but there's at least some of it there now.

What's making that so hard is that it's not just the good feelings that come up. There is almost always a sense of sadness and loss that comes with them, too. I'm pretty sure it comes from the recognition that those good times are over, that they're GONE. There is no chance left of getting to have those again. Oh, sure, there can be other good times. I'm not just shut off to the possibility I may fall in love again, or maybe even get married again. But as good as those might be, they will never be the same as they were with her.

And so I get hit with both, maybe not quite at the same time but in close proximity. And it's hard to know how to sort those out, to shake the pieces so they fall together into a coherent whole. Instead, I end up feeling pulled between both, recalling the good that had been and deeply saddened by the good that can never be again. Torn between the future and the past.

About all I can figure to do is believe that it means I am still moving, and that an escape from this Hell lies at the end of the journey.