“Those are tears in my back,” I thought. “The tissues and muscles are knotted up with all my sadness.”
Many people say that labour is the most intensely physical experience there is. For me, the physical impact on your body of losing your own child eclipses this by far. In many ways, this is completely logical. On a cellular level, the cells of a parent are inextricably linked to those of their child, the same blood flowing through their veins, the same DNA engrained in every fibre of their being. Studies have shown that this bond works in reverse too. Women who have had sons were found to still have Y chromosomes in their bodies up to 15 years after giving birth.
In the immediate aftermath of Oliver’s birth and death, our bodies shut down along with our minds. I was numb to any after-effects of childbirth and in a sense forgot that my body had been through a traumatic experience. I was surprised by my own behaviour. I didn’t break down in racking sobs as I thought I might. Instead, I held Oliver’s body gently with intense concentration, tracing the outline of his face and his hands, trying to imprint it on my own, to breathe the smell of him. I was numb to the feeling that I knew would inevitably come.
In the following weeks, my body woke back up and shocked me with the intensity of sensation. I felt the pain in every fibre of my body. My legs ached as if fault-lines had been carved into the muscle and no amount of pressure or touch would relieve them. Sometimes it felt like my grief was too much, that it had to climb out of my body and charge around next to me. I had physical urges to jump through walls or throw myself out of a car. It was as if my soul couldn’t be contained within the stillness of my body. The only thing that kept me from this sense of falling was to hold my own hands tightly, trying to re-capture something of Oliver’s shape in my palms.
I instinctively knew that I needed movement to help me let go, to stop holding myself so tightly. In my grief, I had completely forgotten how to breathe. I could no longer seem to do it unguided. It still took a few weeks for me to get to a yoga class. On some level, I think I wanted the physical pain to continue – I drew comfort from this and other visible reminders such as my linea nigra and the stubborn curve of my stomach. It took me a while to learn that letting go of the pain does not mean letting go of the love; that this does not have to be a constant balancing act.
My first glimpse of the pain lifting happened during a pranayama session in a beautiful studio in France. I spent two hours alone with my teacher focusing on chest opening exercises and breath work. As the sun streamed into the studio, I surrendered to the feeling of opening my body and filling it with energy. This first awareness was beautiful; I felt strangely closer to Oliver, a sort of dizzy lightness and joy. I was able to see that the pain was mine alone rather than his, and that it actually blocked any connection. Later, I read a passage from CS Lewis and it seemed to fit perfectly: “For, as I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow that H rushes upon my mind in full reality… Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries. The less I mourn the nearer I seem”.
And if you asked me now, I would never undo those physical feelings nor give back any of the pain. I look on that time with an almost fondness I find hard to understand or explain even to myself. Rose-tinted glasses of the most peculiar kind.
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