What does grief feel like?

Grief made me feel as if the light of a thousand torches were shining on me brightly exposing every crack and burning into the very soul of me. Monsters. The only way I can describe it, waiting for me to expose my vulnerability. Not only did it shatter my sense of identity but also my privacy. It felt as if my clothes were coming undone at the seams and I did not have the cotton to sew the pieces back together again. This nightmare scene is playing out in front of everyone, friends, family, members of my church, national television. And there is nothing I can do to stop it as family and friends gather round to support me, fly over from my home country, making it more real and yet I was in so much denial and couldn’t at some level understand all the fuss.

I suppose in many ways you could say that I had the feeling of coming undone and it made me feel extremely anxious. Grief feels so much like fear because you find yourself in territory which is completely unknown and for which you did not plan for. It catches you completely off guard. In my case, because my husband’s death was sudden and unexpected I had no time to prepare for it. And this feeling of lack of control made me very angry. I felt that there were many elements I was battling with within this nightmare although I could not probably define them at the time. And that I should somehow behave in a way that mirrored everyone else’s grief response for fear of being judged as mad! The conflict of managing my feelings privately or breaking down publicly and succumbing to my weakness became one which I eventually internalized. The ‘thing’ that contributed most to this state of confusion was that I was not sure that such heightened, extreme feelings were acceptable in society, further I was not sure that I was strong enough to handle such intensity and morbidness, surely no-one comes out of this alive and so I began to doubt my own sanity.