The Transfer

I started thinking about my grief, today, and what it means to me. My grief keeps me grounded in the confirmation that I loved my husband and that I miss him. I realize I can do both of those things without crying every single night, but realizing is only the first step.

I have been working out very hard lately. I work out at the boxing gym three times a week and two weeks ago, I began spending my Saturdays running four miles and then heading straight for the gym for a two and a half hour workout. I love running and I love the boxing gym. I want to do it.

Last week I took a four day hiatus from the gym and cried every single night, I began working out again and stopped crying. I still feel anxious one-hundred percent of the time, but I haven’t cried. The common beilef is that exercise works wonders on depression, but there is more to my story than just that basic belief.

I haven’t been able to let go of my grief and for the past three weeks, I have sunken into a quagmire of despair and anguish powerful enough to completely shut me down. The shocking part of all of this is that I think I bring the meltdowns on myself, deliberately, but subconsciously. The thought of letting go of my grief brings on an enormous amount of guilt. My husband died. I can’t be happy ever again or that means I didn’t love him or I don’t love him or I never loved him or that I didn’t love him enough if getting over him was this easy. Those are the fears that choke the breath out of me.

I am in quite a bit of physical pain from last night’s crazy-intense workout...and I feel emotionally okay.

It seems to me that I have replaced my emotional anguish with physical pain, which hurts considerably less than grief. Still, in some way, as long as I am in pain, I don’t feel guilty about feeling better. This realization could be the key to my next phase of forward movement. The more physical pain I experience (healthy pain) the more I can forgive myself for easing up on the emotional pain.

I thought about a scene from Stephen King’s The Green Mile where John Coffey is using his special healing powers to suck the brain cancer out of Melinda Moores, the Warden’s wife. He puts his mouth over hers and ingests the poison out of her, and when he has taken all of the evil from within her, He turns and exhales an ominous, treacherous storm of insects into the air and collapses into a heap of exhaustion, leaving her to awaken back into herself and her life, after her cancer is no longer in possession over her mind.

In some ways, I feel like Melinda Moores. The gym is my John Coffey. It sucks the bad oxygen out of me, the stuff that feeds the grief, and the exercise replaces the bad air with healthy oxygen that leaves me physically stronger and emotionally too exhausted to grieve, which for me, translates to “relaxed.”

I feel as though I can combat grief with pain for now and eventually free myself from both the anguish and the pain.