The Fluidity of Time in Early Grief
“Are you ok to drive?” Joe asked tenderly.
The sense of panic-fear (traumatic grief) jolted me. After nearly 30 years of practicing to distinguish and differentiate the finer points of my inner landscape, I had no clue.
No clue
what I could or couldn’t do;
what I did or did not need;
what I thought or felt.
I was five.
No, I was forty-five.
Or I don’t know.
-Megan Malick, journal winter 2023
I yearned for words robust enough to clothe those first moments. I sought language to express what seemed so indefinable, illogical, and unknowable. The clinician in me identified the hallmarks of traumatic grief— decompensation, dissociation, fragmentation, disintegration. In reality, younger parts of us become activated during “regular” day-to-day life. I knew the feeling of having a younger version slip into the driver’s seat and drive myself.
I had never felt or experienced anything like this.
My conscious mind remained very aware I was a 45-year-old woman. My body felt like a container holding the ocean of time. History and present swirled together. Time seemed so malleable. Even the air around me seemed to breathe between timelines.
I turned to the words and work of grief and soul activist Francis Weller:
Grief work relies upon our ability to stay present in our adult selves. This requires that we address the ways in which we dissociate, fragment, and slip into unconscious states.
Yes. This.
Weller’s writing process for working with the younger and fragmented parts of ourselves provided much-needed structure to parent myself during the first year of grief. It offered a way to make meaning of the feelings swirling inside. It invited me to reckon with my emotional inheritance.
For over a year, I leaned into the writing process
Finding myself. Parenting myself. Calling me home.
Rinse.
Wash.
Repeat.
One word led to the next.
Words became sentences
Became paragraphs
Became pages
Became a story holding all the parts of me—
Including the parts that I inherited.
The parts my parents didn’t want to pass down—but they did.
The parts my parents likely inherited, too.
The parts my grandparents didn’t mean to pass down—but they did.
Learning to listen to these parts opened a deep appreciation in me for how hard all of my parts (and my parents’ parts) worked to survive.
Photo Credit: Heike Quiring Martin
How can you begin to listen to your parts?
If you recognize parts of yourself and want to get to know them better, journaling with them could be a supportive container.
These journal prompts guided me. I adapted them from Frances Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Please take what serves you, speaks to you, and meets you. Let go of anything that does not support you and your own journey.
How old is this child part of you? Do they have a name? What do they look like?
What are their basic assumptions about life:
Love
Safety
Power
Race
The World
Family
Women
Men
Themselves
Death
What does this child part of you expect from their assumptions?
How does this child part of you survive and cope with the world as they perceive it?
What activates the child and leads them to your driver’s seat?
When this child is in your driver’s seat, what happens to you
in your body
in your mind/thoughts
in your heart and with your feelings
What is the gift living inside your child?
These are a few prompts for you to explore with the younger parts of you. You, too, may discover that you inherited some of these parts.
Perhaps you know what it’s like to be disoriented by loss and grief. You struggle to find words big enough to hold all that lives inside. You may wonder—Am I crazy? So often, I have heard clients ask, “Am I crazy?” So often, I wondered of my own self— “Am I crazy?”
Then, my inner clinician reminds me about the brain and unexpected loss and grief. I take a deep breath, and I sigh. Yes, this grief work is part of humaning…and becoming.
If you resonate with this, I invite you to consider that no task asks us to emotionally mature more than reckoning with our significant losses and grief. There are so many supportive practices to help you with that. Journaling is just one.
Whether through journaling or another practice, may you discover the gifts that your parts hold.
With you on the journey,
Megan (she/her) AKA The Accidental Matriarch
Photo Credit: Heike Quiring Martin
Thank you so much for being here. If you’d like more support in your loss and logistics journey, please be in touch.
Grief may be solitary work, but you do not need to do it alone.
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