Turboglacier had to put his cat to sleep this weekend. After I sobbed through that post, I thought about how much I still miss cats and dogs and people who have died. I really did think of them in that order, and that made me feel guilty. But I still feel like people who are dead are still with me, not so much pets though. That surprised me.
Today as I was doing some writing at school I was thinking that different kinds of grief make me feel different physically. As I wrote, I was trying to figure out exactly how each kind of grief felt, until I was a little bit of a mess and decided maybe I would continue the experiment when I wasn't surrounded by my students. Here are the ones I found:
Losing a loved pet or person, or feeling for someone else who has lost a loved pet or person, makes me feel like the contents of my chest want to come out of my mouth. Not a vomiting feeling, but just like I'm turning inside out. I get the same feeling when breaking up with someone I love whom I know I've hurt badly.
Breaking up with someone I love or like a lot because it just won't work makes me feel like my gut is twisting with the knowledge of failure and of war between reason and sentiment.
Being broken up with makes me feel like a heavy stone is sitting in my stomach.
Losing my body makes me feel a kind of despair that's striking in its starkness: I feel absolutely empty inside. No twisting pains, no violent upheavals or sobbing, no pit-of-stomach heaviness. Just an utterly vast feeling of being deserted and there being nothing to do, nothing more of myself anymore. If I cry when I'm feeling this kind of grief, there's no sound.
I thought it was interesting because I've always thought of sadness as one kind of emotion, but thinking about the physical nature of it made me realize how many different kinds of grief there are.