Brain Fog / Grief Brain

Day 1532.

Parts of me are very high functioning.

I have endless energy for my grieving Mothers.
I deeply love them all as well as their children, both living and dead.
The brilliantly grieving siblings are my inspiration.

I wade endlessly through the red tape of my charity and all the bureaucracy, that seems to cost money at every turn.
I spend hours working out how to bring free Naloxone and training through our foundation to anyone who wants it.
My brain can stay crystaline on this stuff all day and all night long, and it does.

But what about this other part of my brain? What about this brain fog? What we call ‘grief brain’?

Lost in that old-world London pea soup fog are:
My passwords
My car keys
My house keys
My reading glasses
The laundry souring in the washing machine..or is it already back in wardrobe?
What day of the week it is
How to take a screen shot on my lap top
And fuck knows what else
And I use ‘find my iPhone’ far too often to admit.

Ok, yes, so I am pushing 60.
I am tackling a new and complex field against a Goliath.
Wrangling new software.
I am doing a lot.

BUT

Some of my grief group are young.
Many of them are still tending, as they were before, to their other children.
And they have the foggy grief brain too.

My fog brain has been ignored too long.
I have been powering through it, just pushing more power to the pedal.
But now this rolling fog of 50’s horror movies, is now creeping into my functioning layer.
It’s like that layer of my brain is out of registration - like when the ink dots of a magazine are out of fit and the whole picture gets blurry...that’s me!

Is the fog layer out of fit?
Is the fog layer at a different scale?
Is it just full of bees, buzzing away, getting louder and louder?

Well, somatic trauma therapy to the rescue! ...

It would appear that I have been ignoring it.
Damn right I am ignoring it!
Who likes sitting in an uncomfortable grief fog?
How much lying on the sofa crying can one woman do?
Well, the answer to that appears, in my case, is.. not enough.

How much thinking about my dead child can one woman do?
Well, the answer to that appears, in my case, is.. not enough.

So I took my therapist’s advice and gave it some attention
...and thought, and cried, and sobbed, and wailed, and found new memories of my boy.

She said “Sheila, you have been turned upside down, shaken, smashed on the ground. Of course your layers are out of fit”
and softly we agree that it will ever be so.

But as I strive on designing, calligraphing, drawing...
I see that although, at first, I claimed I had ‘lost my line’ when I draw ...
I note that I now have a ‘new line’ and it impresses me.

And as I write I am realizing that I have a new way of thinking, of seeing, of being - and that impresses me too. I surprise myself all the time.

So is the ‘grief brain’, the ‘fog brain’, just the parts of the ‘new Sheila’ jigsaw that are still in the box?
Whilst the other parts are starting to form?
I have the corners,
I have the edges,
I have the sky,
I have the lake.
But are the window boxes and chalet still in a jumble in the box, waiting for some attention?
Are they the dreaded messy bits that I can not face?

And as I write, the tears fall...and I know it to be true.

I can’t see the full picture, because there’s still some sorting to be done.`````
I just can’t do it all at once.