My heart hurts. Grieving for Bella has gotten harder. Thursday I was depressed. Friday I started the day feeling totally empty, feeling like Bella had never lived. I couldn’t remember what she looked like. I couldn’t feel her spirit.
Then I thought that a lot of my grieving in this lifetime has been for things I never got, not for things I had and lost. I called Lynelle and told her I needed a hug. She came right away and hugged me while I cried. I told her about the emptiness, and she said that this was what she had been worried about, that Bella’s death would trigger my abandonment trauma. She said she was glad to see how strong I was at first, when I could feel Bella’s spirit and the love we’d shared. It actually helped a lot to be able to tell myself “This emptiness is about Mom not Bella.” Then I was able to be with it instead of fighting it.
This morning the emptiness was here again. I think I may not be able to work on it until I see Caryn for Somatic Experiencing. I worked on a project of picking out the best pictures of Bella so I could print them out. Sitting here, I remembered her running to me in the woods, her standing on her hind legs and shrieking Ee! Ee! Ee! when I got back after a time away. Her ecstatic wiggling when she realized it was me.
My heart’s hurting again. I realize that I’ve been doing the S.E. technique called “pendulating,” going back and forth between the trauma, and the resource which today is good memories of Bella. I hadn’t realized that “pendulating” is actually something the brain does naturally when we’re not interfering. That’s why grief comes in layers, times of pain, and times of normality when you can integrate the pain.