Scabbing Over Grief Wounds
Cait Earnest
There’s a tiny scab on the back of my right shoulder, a couple of inches above my armpit crease. It began as a zit I couldn’t stop picking months ago, and now it refuses to heal beyond a rough scab. Sometimes I mindlessly scratch my shoulder and my nail catches the scab at a weird angle. Pain ripples across my upper back. I should probably get it looked at by a doctor, but I have hope that one day I will wake up and the scab will have transformed into a scar, ready to fade and eventually disappear.
There’s a quarter-size scar on the front of my right shoulder, a couple of inches above my armpit crease. It used to be the home of my port, where blood was drawn out and chemotherapy drugs were pumped in. Two years after the port was removed, it’s still pink and a little gooey-looking. The scar once held memories of fear and discomfort, but today it radiates freedom and life.
I was 23 years old when I learned what it means to grieve. My grieving style then involved countless bottles of Two-Buck-Chuck and countless days of laying in bed without the will or desire to move.
Denial.
Sadness.
Anger.
Heartbreak.
It was my first semester of law school and my husband told me he was gay. We had both uprooted ourselves and moved across the country so I could attend the school I wanted, only to breakup a few short months later.
Drowning my thoughts in bottom of the barrel wine, I wondered how I let this happen. I thought then that I was going through the hardest thing I would ever go through. It felt like the end of the world, yet it was only the first of what will be a lifetime of little and big losses.
I was 28 when I was diagnosed with cancer. Every loss I experienced before then faded and the grief of possibly dying took over my whole life. First I lost my hair and appetite; then I lost my motivation and ability to envision a life beyond survival.
With each new loss I began to wonder, “Does life exist outside the cycle of grief? Is it a cycle I can ever break?”
Grief is like trauma: layer stacked upon layer, each layer becoming part of my DNA. Each new layer covers a healing wound, like thin new skin beginning to scab over a gash, vulnerable and likely to be ripped open again. As the wound heals, more layers of fragile skin fortify and harden the scab. The layers grow and integrate, weaving together the old and the new. While the surface skin heals, the wound underneath heals.
Some losses are like paper cuts, while others are like severed limbs. Some losses become infected and fester because I neglected to tend to the wound.
Eventually it becomes impossible to recognize which wound belongs to which loss, because the scars meld together, touch, and take on new shapes of their own. Some become distinguishing marks and permanent reminders of how a single moment in time changed me.
Every year on the day I got married, I feel that scab and am reminded that the wound underneath is still healing. If my nail scratches it at the wrong angle, pain ripples across my heart. It took a long time for the skin to heal over that gash. Tender memories of something lost and gone were triggered each time I accidentally picked the scab, revealing the raw wound underneath. Healing was, and still is, uncomfortably slow.
And for the last two years I have celebrated the day my port was removed. I never picked at or toyed with the wound. Instead, I let the sutured together skin set the pace as I honored the pain and process. Sometimes the muscles underneath sting as they remember a time when a plastic pincushion was lodged in my chest, but those memories fade the more I move beyond my grief.
Life is fragile, like skin. Loss is inescapable and constant. The cycle is unbreakable, but because of that cycle that I can become unbreakable. All of my wounds eventually heal and the scars will eventually fade, just in time for me to scrape my knee or stub my toe.
There’s a quarter-size scar on the front of my right shoulder, a couple of inches above my armpit crease. It used to be the home of my port, where blood was drawn out and chemotherapy drugs were pumped in. Two years after the port was removed, it’s still pink and a little gooey-looking. The scar once held memories of fear and discomfort, but today it radiates freedom and life.
I was 23 years old when I learned what it means to grieve. My grieving style then involved countless bottles of Two-Buck-Chuck and countless days of laying in bed without the will or desire to move.
Denial.
Sadness.
Anger.
Heartbreak.
It was my first semester of law school and my husband told me he was gay. We had both uprooted ourselves and moved across the country so I could attend the school I wanted, only to breakup a few short months later.
Drowning my thoughts in bottom of the barrel wine, I wondered how I let this happen. I thought then that I was going through the hardest thing I would ever go through. It felt like the end of the world, yet it was only the first of what will be a lifetime of little and big losses.
I was 28 when I was diagnosed with cancer. Every loss I experienced before then faded and the grief of possibly dying took over my whole life. First I lost my hair and appetite; then I lost my motivation and ability to envision a life beyond survival.
With each new loss I began to wonder, “Does life exist outside the cycle of grief? Is it a cycle I can ever break?”
Grief is like trauma: layer stacked upon layer, each layer becoming part of my DNA. Each new layer covers a healing wound, like thin new skin beginning to scab over a gash, vulnerable and likely to be ripped open again. As the wound heals, more layers of fragile skin fortify and harden the scab. The layers grow and integrate, weaving together the old and the new. While the surface skin heals, the wound underneath heals.
Some losses are like paper cuts, while others are like severed limbs. Some losses become infected and fester because I neglected to tend to the wound.
Eventually it becomes impossible to recognize which wound belongs to which loss, because the scars meld together, touch, and take on new shapes of their own. Some become distinguishing marks and permanent reminders of how a single moment in time changed me.
Every year on the day I got married, I feel that scab and am reminded that the wound underneath is still healing. If my nail scratches it at the wrong angle, pain ripples across my heart. It took a long time for the skin to heal over that gash. Tender memories of something lost and gone were triggered each time I accidentally picked the scab, revealing the raw wound underneath. Healing was, and still is, uncomfortably slow.
And for the last two years I have celebrated the day my port was removed. I never picked at or toyed with the wound. Instead, I let the sutured together skin set the pace as I honored the pain and process. Sometimes the muscles underneath sting as they remember a time when a plastic pincushion was lodged in my chest, but those memories fade the more I move beyond my grief.
Life is fragile, like skin. Loss is inescapable and constant. The cycle is unbreakable, but because of that cycle that I can become unbreakable. All of my wounds eventually heal and the scars will eventually fade, just in time for me to scrape my knee or stub my toe.