Extended Slow Motion
How grief rewires your world, your senses, and your identity.
When you are widowed, life is thrown into a fight scene from the Matrix. Suddenly, your go-go-go life is shot entirely in extended slow motion. Things speed up comically fast, then crawl to a halt.
The first days, like cancer treatment, are filled with hurry up and wait, and you feel like you’re standing still while everyone else around you is the proverbial ant marching. Decisions made. Obituary written. Funeral planned. Phone calls. Meals. Thank you notes. Hugs given. Hugs received. Flowers fill the house. People put food in your hands and ask you to eat, but it is sawdust in your mouth, and they don’t notice that you nibble and set it aside.
It is a shockingly empty void of chaos and numbness.
Life as you know it will never be the same again.
You will never be the same again.
You sit in your house, staring at the walls, wondering what is left in this life. Your friend comes to get rid of the decaying flowers because the thought of doing so gives you a panic attack. People visit, and you have nothing to say, and that’s confusing to them, possibly hurtful, because you were always a talker.
Then, the noise stops. The flowers die. The phone stops ringing. Eventually, the quiet comes. That quiet becomes part of who you are, and, years later, friends will ask if anything is wrong because you are quiet.
There is nothing wrong. You have changed in a way that feels genetic.
You journal and track patterns, realizing you favor more sensory extremes. An ice cube in the hand when your anxiety is high. An icy cold beer in a boiling hot shower. The burn of the leather car seats on your thighs during a southern summer. Electric guitars and throbbing bass fill the silence when you can’t take it anymore, a wall of sound to protect your brain and remind you of the actual rage and anger hidden behind floral dresses, blue eyes, and red lipstick.
You look the same. But the eyes tell the story. Dark circles persist no matter how much you sleep, and your once best feature is now rheumy and lined.
It goes deeper, to where you seek silence and quiet. Solitude is where you process and heal. Isolation, you learn, is not healthy, and there is a fine line when seeking that space where you go to protect yourself.
Days are spent in bed, reading everything and remembering nothing. Vegetables rot in the crisper drawer. DoorDash is your friend, and hygiene is out the window.
You learn that the quiet, the rage, the anger, the silence, the tears, the sometimes forced laughter, the broken woman staring back at you in the mirror is not abstract. She is lost to the abyss.
One day, you are surprised.
Food starts to have taste. The laughter isn’t forced. What was once shades of grey begins to take on color. You are still quiet.
The silence is heavy, yet light at the same time.
The woman in the mirror becomes more familiar.
She is familiar, but she is a stranger. You realize you have no idea who you are anymore.
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