The Body Always Remembers

I remember when I was younger and learning to play the piano, I would practice small measures over and over again, to get the notes in my muscle memory.  So each hand could play independently. but together without thought.  To this day I can still sit down at the piano and play Fur Elise without even thinking.  The body always remembers. The mind can try to re-work, or even try to forget, but the body remembers.

Body memory is something that I have heard a lot about in the loss community. It happens very often after a loss. And I had it too. The weeks and months after Elisa was born still, the phantom kicks I would feel reminding me of what was, what should have been

What I wasn’t prepared for was the body memory that would come around at important dates and anniversaries. I have been preparing for a while that this week would be hard. Elisa’s “first birthday” is on Wednesday. I knew January would be hard, I knew this week would be hard and I knew the actual day would be hard. I took her birthday off of work, and Mark and I even got away this weekend for a little trip to Sequim, where “adventures with baby beluga” began

I knew this time would be hard, but I figured it would be for the typical grief ways. What I wasn’t prepared for was how it would swing me back to the ways I felt shortly after her death.

After Elisa was born I had very strong PTSD. It is common after the loss of a child. I was jumpy, skittish. I couldn’t be in places with loud noises. The noises would leave me in a panic, overwhelmed emotionally and I would break down. I stopped going to sounders games because the sound and the claustrophobia of the crowd was too much. I declined events where I knew there would be loud noises. At work when someone would come to talk to me at my desk, I would jump, my heart would start racing and it took everything to hold myself together.

Over time, and with the help of my counselor, I have come very far in my recovery from PTSD. There are still times when a loud noise scares me, but I am able to rationalize it, and it doesn’t make me come unhinged…

That was until just the last few days. I can only attribute it to the fact that we are coming up on Elisa’s birthday and like I said, the body knows, it remembers and returns to old pathways.

We were watching the Dark Night, and I had to ask Mark to turn it off. One small loud noise in the movie and I was crying in fear.

Later I was in the older room and I heard a fire alarm on the TV. I panicked. Because if I live in a world where my unborn daughter could die, then I also lived in a world where a siren must mean our house is going to burn down, and I would lose Mark too.

Mark accidentally dropped his phone on his way to bed, when I was already asleep and I shot up immediately as if I heard a gunshot.

I am using my coping mechanisms that I have learned through counseling and I know I will work through this, just as I did before, it was just an unexpected reminder from the body that I live in a different world than I did one year ago.