Lately, writing the words of my heart has been so hard. It’s not that I don’t have experiences, thoughts, or feelings that I can share. It was so “easy” to write early in my grief journey, and part of me thinks it is because I was so numb from the trauma I had experienced.
If you have ever had surgery, you may know that when you first wake up, you don’t feel the pain of surgery from all the medications you had been on and a little bit of the shock your body just went through. However, over the next few days or weeks, you start to feel the pain more and more.
Even after the healing starts, you may go through physical therapy and have to work on rebuilding your muscles and/or joints. You have to strengthen where the wound occurred.
Over time, your surgery cuts become scars. I received a 6-inch scar down my leg when I had knee surgery. If I still run anything across this area of my body, I can feel it tingle and feel slight discomfort. Whether you can handle different sensations in your area of repair or not, you can see your scars.
Scars are a visual reminder of the shock, change, and/or trauma that your body went through because something was broken and had to be ‘fixed.’ From my experience, I have learned that having surgery doesn’t ‘fix’ anything and bring it back to perfect, but it is fixed to the best of the doctor’s ability. It’s fixed to the point where you can learn to function again.
This is grief for me.
Over the last year, the numbness has started to fade away. The wounds are deep and painful. While healing is a journey, it’s not easy. There is a level of pain in the memories, but there is also an immense amount of love. There is a sense of knowing that I will never be who I was before the loss of Archer. However, there will be a point when I learn to function again with the healing and work I am trying to put into my grief.
The loss of Archer has left a scar on my heart. While it will never go away, it reminds me of the love that existed here on earth and still exists in my life.
This week, or around this week, a friend felt compelled to share Matthew West’s song with me called Hard Season. Below is the music video describing where I think I am.
