Day 47: When the World Goes Back to Normal and You Don't

I cannot tell you what I did on day 47.

That's not a literary choice. That is the actual answer. I cannot tell you what I did, where I went, what I said to anyone, what I ate, whether I ate. I have voice notes from that week that I made at three in the morning because sleep was not a thing my body would do, and when I listen to them now I cannot recognize the voice.

That woman was running a gym. That woman was working as a physical therapist. That woman was working for a powerlifting federation, taking calls, making decisions, holding pieces of other people's lives together in her hands. That woman was my body. I was inside her, but I was not her. I was somewhere underneath her, watching her go through the motions of a life that I no longer had.

Day 47 was about six weeks after Steven died.

Six weeks is the moment the world expects you to be back. Not over it — nobody says that out loud — but functioning. Showing up. Returning the texts. Running your business. Doing your job. Going to the grocery store without breaking down in the cereal aisle, although I broke down in the cereal aisle anyway because he ate that cereal and the box looked at me like an accusation.

Six weeks is the cliff.

It is the moment the sympathy infrastructure collapses and you have to keep going anyway, and you discover that there was never any infrastructure to begin with. There was just the shock of the first two weeks, the awkward muddle of weeks three and four, and then — silence. You wake up on a Tuesday and you are alone in the wreckage of your old life and the entire rest of the world is at brunch.

What week six actually felt like

I want to describe it specifically because I have read so much grief writing in the last three years and almost none of it gets this part right.

Week six is not sad. Sad is too small a word. Sad is what you feel at the funeral when someone reads a poem. Week six is something else. Week six is the part where the floor gives out. Week six is the part of grief where the adrenaline has worn off and the meals have stopped and there is nothing left between you and the sheer cliff face of he is actually not coming back, ever, this is my life now.

Your body knows it before your brain does. My body knew it. My body could not sleep. My body could not digest food. My body would not regulate temperature — I was cold all the time, in Las Vegas, in summer, wearing his sweatshirt over my own clothes because nothing else made me feel like a person. I would forget if I had eaten. I would forget if I had taken medication. I would walk into a room and lose the thread of why I had walked there. I drove my car places and arrived without being able to tell you which route I took.

This is grief brain. It is real and it is documented and it is, in the early weeks, indistinguishable from a concussion. The prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain that plans, decides, sequences, remembers — goes offline. Not metaphorically. Functionally. You are operating on the cognitive bandwidth of someone who has not slept in three days, except you have not slept in six weeks, and you will not sleep, properly, for months.

And in the middle of that, I had a business to run.

The thing nobody warns you about

I want to be very clear about what week six actually requires of you, because I think this is the part that broke me, and I think it breaks a lot of people, and I have never seen anyone describe it in the language it deserves.

By week six, the world has decided you are back.

People stop calling. People stop texting. People stop asking how you are — or worse, they start asking it like a normal question, like you might say fine and mean it, like you are someone who can be asked that question without it landing in your body like a dropped plate. The ones who got it kept showing up. The two or three people. The rest of them — and I do not mean this with bitterness, I mean it as a fact — went back to their lives. Which is what people do. Which is what they are supposed to do. The world cannot stop turning because one woman lost her husband.

But.

The world's clock and the griever's clock are not the same clock.

By week six, the world is on day 47 and you are still on day one. You are still, in your body, sitting on the floor of the room where you got the call. You have not moved from that room. Time has done its thing on the outside — the calendar has flipped pages, the seasons have shifted slightly, your inbox has filled and emptied and filled again — but inside, you are still in the moment when everything ended. You will be in that moment for a long time.

So you go to work. You run your gym. You see your clients. You take the federation calls and you discuss logistics and standards and qualifying totals and you do all of this while underneath it, in a layer of you that nobody can see, you are sitting on the floor of that room, and you have not stopped sitting on that floor, and you may not stop for years.

The split is what nobody warns you about.

You are not allowed to be where you actually are. You have to perform being where the world thinks you should be. And the cost of that performance — the energy required to walk around at week six pretending to be a functioning adult while your entire interior architecture is rubble — is something I do not have words for, even now, three years out.

It is the loneliest thing I have ever experienced. And I was not alone. I had two or three people who got it. I had texts I could send at 3am that would be answered. I had Steven's family, who was inside the same wreckage with me, in their own way. I was not alone.

I was just not where anyone could reach me.

The “how are you” problem

I want to say something about this question, because by week six, it had become unbearable.

In the first two weeks, how are you meant something. People asked it carefully, with their voice low, with the understanding that the answer was going to be not okay and they were prepared to sit with that. By week six, the question had transformed. People asked it the way you ask a coworker on Monday morning. Casual. Throwaway. Expecting a fine, you?

And I would stand there in the produce aisle, or at the front desk of the gym, or in a parking lot, and I would have to make a choice in real time: do I lie, or do I detonate this person's afternoon.

I lied a lot. I'm hanging in there. Day by day. You know. All the things you say. None of them true. All of them necessary, because the alternative was telling a stranger that I had not slept in five nights and I was crying in my car between every appointment and I was not sure I was going to make it through the next month, and that is not what people are asking when they ask how you are.

What I wanted, at week six, was for people to stop asking.

What I wanted was for someone to walk up to me and not ask. Not say anything at all. Just sit next to me. Just hand me a coffee. Just exist in the same room as me without requiring me to perform okayness as the price of admission.

That is what the two or three people did. They didn't ask. They knew. They sent texts that said thinking of you, no need to reply. They came over and didn't try to fix me. They were there, and they did not require me to be anywhere I wasn't.

What I wish someone had said at week six

If I could go back and put one thing in the hands of the woman I was on day 47, it would be a single sentence. Not a card. Not a meal. Not a Bible verse. Not a stages-of-grief diagram.

Just this:

You are not failing. You are exactly where this puts people. There is no version of this you are doing wrong.

The fog is not a personal weakness. The inability to function is not a character flaw. Your brain is offline because your life ended six weeks ago and your body is still trying to figure out what to do with the wreckage. Stop trying to be back. You are not back. You are not going to be back. There is no back. You are at the start of becoming someone you have not yet met, and that becoming is going to take years, and the woman doing it is allowed to be ruined for as long as she needs to be ruined.

Nobody said that to me. I had to figure it out alone, slowly, over the next three years.

This piece is me handing it back, in case you are at week six right now. Or week sixteen. Or week sixty. The math doesn't actually matter. The fog is the fog.

One last thing

If you are reading this because someone you love is at their day 47 — six weeks out from a loss, just past the point where the world has stopped catching them — I want to say this directly:

Do not ask how they are.

Show up anyway. Send the text that says thinking of you, no need to reply. Drop off the coffee without making them come downstairs. Sit in the same room as them and do not require them to perform anything. Be one of the two or three people. Be the person they don't have to lie to.

The grace period everyone else gives them ended at week two. Yours has not ended. Yours does not end. That is the entire job.

It is not glamorous. It is not Instagrammable. There will be no thank-you note, because they are not going to remember most of week six, and the parts they remember they are not going to want to talk about for a long time.

But you will be in their life on the other side. And the people who showed up at week six — the ones who did not require anything from them, the ones who simply existed in the same room — those are the people who get to know the new self when she finally arrives.

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I love you. I am proud of you.