Looking back over the last eight months since Kenny died, I realized that I had some sort of fog in my brain that I hadn’t realized was there until I started to come out of it a few weeks ago. I had an energy clearing last month by another energy healer and I think that was the catalyst for this fog starting to clear away. I happened across something on the Internet last month called widow brain. As I read about what it was and how it affects you I realized that this is exactly what I had been going through. It was a bright light shone onto something that was making me think I was losing my mind.
As so often happens when you’ve gone through some type of traumatic experience, your brain turns on a switch to help you cope. The switch that comes on after your spouse dies is called widow brain. It comes with a laundry list of “symptoms”, some of which nearly convinced me I was teetering on the edge of madness and that I was completely stupid and worthless.
I could not think straight. I felt like I was walking through a thick haze every minute of every day. I would hear someone say something to me and what I heard either didn’t register with me or only stayed in my head for a very short time. I literally could not process some of the information being told to me or that I was reading. At times, I could not form the simplest of thoughts in my head. This made it hard to learn things and some people thought I was just stupid or inept (or both) for not being able to.
I was very forgetful of a lot of things. I didn’t remember people telling me something, even when they swore they did tell me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t listening to them when they told me-I just did not remember them saying it to me. I often jumbled up in my head some of the things people did say to me. I couldn’t repeat back to them what they just said to me and have it come out of my mouth the same way it came out of theirs.
I forgot how to do some things. I would sit there and look at something I knew how to do before and would think to myself How do I do this? I just could not figure it out. I would be staring at the task at hand with a blank look on my face, silently trying to understand what to do and wondering why I could not remember how to do it. I felt confused a lot of the time. The feelings of frustration made me angry at myself and my feelings of worthlessness were compounded.
I burst out into tears at the most random times. I may have suddenly remembered something about my husband that I had forgotten. I may have come across something of his and started to cry as I held it in my hands. My feelings of extreme sadness and despair were crippling to me and there were some people who were cruel in their inability and refusal to understand this. To those people I will say this-when you lose your loved one I will show you the grace and understanding you did not show to me at a time in my life when I needed it the most.
I was exhausted, both physically and mentally. I could do not much of anything on any given day. I needed to sleep much more than normal. This was my body’s way of healing itself in the ways it needed to be healed. Aches and pains in my body that weren’t there before were there now. This was the extreme feelings of grief manifesting itself as physical pain.
Widow brain affects a good amount of people who’ve lost their spouse. There is no written in stone timeline of how long it will last. It’s different for everyone, just like how long it takes for you to go through your grieving process. I do believe the energy clearing I had facilitated the beginning of the fog and haze lifting from the widow brain. I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see it leave because I will not. This whole process of grieving and dealing with widow brain has been excruciating to go through and I’ll be thankful to be on the other side of it. Since that fog has started to lift, I can finally see a little bit of light at the end of that dark tunnel I’ve been stuck in for the last 249 days.