Injury, Loss, and Scars

Reflections a year after losing Melanie.



When you break a bone a few different processes are set in motion:

Pain

You feel immediate severe pain. This severe pain lasts minutes, hours, or days depending on the severity of the injury. After a while it rolls into more of a dull aching pain, which gradually subsides. Eventually the pain decreases until it is gone.

Healing

I haven't taken any biology classes since my sophomore year of high school, but there is a pretty well understood physiological process by which your body heals a broken bone. It can take weeks or months, but eventually with good rehab, your broken bone can be as strong as ever, although usually an expert could detect evidence of a healed fracture on an x-ray.

Learning

You learn to avoid situations that are likely to lead to similar injury. You also learn how to cope with pain, and how your body's healing process feels. Veteran professional athletes have often learned enough to be masters of their own body - knowing where their limits are, how to avoid dangerous situations, when they can play through pain and when they need to sit out.



I think grief is a lot like physical injury. Sometime in this year since Melanie died, the pain went away. And just like the finger I broke in April doesn't hurt any more, every once in a while something happens that makes me remember that pain. Sometimes I can even feel it, just for a second.

What is tricky about psychological injury is that the healing and learning blur together. Healing from loss is going on with your life, and being able to be productive and happy. That can be really hard for some people. You have to learn how to put aside your pain when you can, and take time out to deal with the pain when you need to - basically you have to learn how to heal yourself.

If someone asked me how I was feeling about the loss, I'd think about it and say that while the pain is mostly gone, I feel pretty much the same as I did that day. I don't think there's really any way to fully wrap your mind around the devastating completeness of death, which I realized painfully a year ago and I realize it peacefully now.

But learning from previous experiences with loss helped me heal quickly. My philosophy of life - part of which could be crudely expressed as "enjoy what you have and don't take anything for granted" - made it pretty easy for me to be happy and productive.

I got to spend a couple years working with a great girl, and I enjoyed it. Melanie got to live 25 years and I know she loved her life, because I saw it on her face every day. So I was able to get past feeling sorry for her, and I got past feeling sorry for myself. I probably haven't been very good about helping others deal with it, but I hope that by writing about it, maybe that will be of comfort to someone.

We're all born with the certainty of dying. All of us. I guess you could take that and see all life as tragic since it leads to death, but I just can't see it that way. I'd rather enjoy what I get.

There's a quote from Fight Club that was something like "you don't want to die without any scars do you?" Well, I have a nasty scar on my palm from tearing it open climbing a fence. I have a scar on my forehead from the chicken pox, and a scar under my eye from a car accident. I probably have one of those x-ray scars on my pinky from a basketball collision, and I have a scar from losing Melanie.

I'm glad I have scars.