A long look at my tired eyes.

(thoughts as I cleaned a house with huge mirrors where I could not hide, as I usually do, from the visible impacts of long term stress, illness & isolation caused by grief)

Grief, when it settles in the body, is not a single shattering.
It is sediment.
Layer after layer of silent weight, settling into the joints, the fascia, the deep muscle of a being. Changing posture, gait. Deep lines, brittle hair, tired eyes.

I feel like a broken record when I say: my son died;
And with him, a version of me—the future I once imagined for us both.

But he is still dead. And I am still chronically undone by it.

Sometimes I think that my grief is stuck inside because I could never scream loud enough for it to be fully released. My throat bleeds for days every time I’ve tried.
So the grief curled inward.
Folded itself into bone and breath, tucked itself behind my eyes and beneath my ribs. Infused and informed my cellular composition.

Time moved on, as it will, as it does.
People carried on, as they do, as they must.
And I became a woman living inside of a silent scream, my body a sacred temple in the jungle, dilapidated into entropy and forgotten except by birds.

Not irreparable.
But my story rewritten.

The years since have been marked not as much by milestones, as by endurance.
By the quiet, heavy labor of survival.
By waking up to a body that carries more than just tears and years;
A body that has held vigil.
A body that has absorbed absence like rain into dry earth.

There are seasons I have forgotten how to live. How to be in my body.
Not in a sudden & cinematic way—but in the slow erosion of my capacity & passion for life.
I’ve forgotten how to walk into rooms I used to light up.
How to meet eyes.
How to feel at ease in a world that demands small talk while my soul is speaking elegy.

And yet—and yet—
Something in me has insisted on staying.

Not through sheer willpower. Not through grit.
But through something softer & quieter I think.
Something like breath. Like moss. Like mercy.

I began to listen to the language beneath words.
To the way my body trembles when I stop ignoring it.
To the way it softens—just slightly—when I offer it kindness.
A hand on my heart.
A breath into my belly.
A walk in the first light of morning.
Time spent not solving, not assuaging, just being. this. here. now.

This is not a redemption story.
I do not have a beautiful phoenix rising to offer you.

What I have is something more tender.
More honest.

I have the body of a woman who has lost her only child
and is learning how to live again, to reanimate, re-inhabit, reorient. Stay.

I have a nervous system on high alert that flinches from too muchness
a spirit that craves stillness & silliness
and a heart that refuses to stop beating, striving, & loving.

I have wisdom that comes not from transcendence, but from staying close to the earth, paying attention, and tending this endless ache instead of abandoning her even though it is heavy and hard & she is so fucking tired.

Somatics have not saved me—love does that.
But it is returning me to myself, one breath, one gesture, one hum at a time.

This is not the life I imagined.
But it is my life.

And I am—against the odds—still in it.

Not because I am strong.
But because I am soft enough to keep opening.

The body remembers.
Yes.
But she also reclaims.

And I am learning—slowly, fiercely, tenderly—how to begin again. Again and again and again.

And this life—this life I sometimes yearn to flee from—
is, in moments, so astonishingly beautiful that my heart bursts

Not because it’s been easy.
But because it still believes in me.

Not blooming. Not shining.
Just breathing.

And for today, that is enough.