The body not only keeps score, but

It remembers, feels the death-versary approaching...

When I was in the fifth grade, I wrote a short story called, “A Memory.” It won a prize and got published in the local paper, which was a big deal for a ten year old.

It was descriptive and about the fall. I depicted the crunch of the leaves and the crispness of the air. It was also about loss, the narrator had lost her best friend.

There’s something deeply ironic to me about this now.

As much as I love the warmer weather, and believe I belong in the tropics, I also do get happily nostalgic when the beautiful fall foliage is at its peak and the air has that delicious crispness to it. I do miss it when I’ve resided in warmer climates.

It reminds me of some of the few positive associations I have with my hometown, where I grew up, like—

It reminds me of going back to school in southwestern NY state, which makes me think of the hustle and bustle and new excitement of buying school supplies.

It reminds me of running Cross-Country with my best friend all throughout high school.

It reminds me of Halloween, trick or treating.

It also reminds me Thanksgiving and that was always my favorite holiday, eating together with a side of my family that I rarely saw. And of my beloved, late Grandma Donelson and her amazing apple (with cheese) and pumpkin pie (with cool whip).

It reminds me of coziness and scarves and blankets and sweaters, and yes—pumpkin spice, and chili and soup weather.

So, lately, I’ve been walking around my beautiful campus at Austin Peay, taking in these lovely nostalgic fall memories.

I drove to the Great Smokey mountains last weekend for fall break and did a lot of walking there and at a state park, taking in the colorful leaves and enjoying the crunch of my dead ones underfoot.

But, there’s a twinge of something else.

It is this visceral sense of dread.

It’s a contradiction in terms; how could it be both?

Ah, I don’t know, but it is.

I look up, at some foliage starting to look brown, when the days have been overcast lately, reminiscent of late fall, and I feel this pit forming in my stomach. A sinking and saddening emotion.

It is October. And while they are indeed lovely, and I too am glad that I live in a world where they exist, like Lucy Maud Montgomery—

I know: my body, memories and senses, they are bracing for what comes after.

This poignant memory:

My father completed suicide on October 29, 2015.

Startling that it has been eight years.

It was late fall then, the leaves were gone and it was cool in southwestern NY state. I remember the trees were bare, skeleton-like. I remember the wind whistled noisily, flapping their empty branches around, either like they were scared or angry or frantic. Perhaps crying for help.

It is interesting to me not only how the body keeps score of the wounds of the event(s) his suicide and all that trauma did to my body, the event itself, but the surrounding state of shock and details of burial and caring for my traumatized mother.

I find this odd because I don’t immediately feel the coolness and immediately connects to his death. The late fall doesn’t spontaneously illicit the most poignant or traumatic parts of that time, surrounding his death. It isn’t connected like to elicit that immediate memory.

But my body, my mind does recall. It knows this time of year, all that it did to my neurology, my physiology, to leave its mark on me, even all these years later. Even after all the therapy, EMDR and somatic healing.

It is on some primitive, visceral level that I associate this time of year, the feel of this weather on my skin, these familiar sights and smells, with his death.

Like, it is warning me. That that time is again approaching.

I consider this as I continue try to understand what it means to be traumatized:

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, trauma expert, says trauma is a disease that robs you from being fully in the present.

I think he is right in all sorts of small ways as well, not just the big event memories. Even something as simple of bodily memories of changing seasons.

It makes me think of the overlaps then, between grief and trauma. Is not grief also to rob someone of the present? Where [sometimes] those bereaved are burdened with the memories of the deceased so that they are unable to be present?

Grief can be trauma, can be traumatic. Any loss can.

Paradoxically, though, grief can also keep you so fully ingrained in the present moment, and that’s the incessant pain of it, right? That constant reminder that you have to endure, to live with, that unfailing honest and deep ceded hardcore truth that your beloved is no longer here with you. And is gone forever, in this earthly realm.

Overlaps of grief and trauma, where one begins and one ends fascinate me, because it is entirely dependent on the person and how they process the event. Completely subjective. Ie—I don’t get to say yours is not trauma but just grief.

Roots of trauma that are later diagnosed and labeled as depression, generalized anxiety disorder, borderline personality disorder, and OCD also fascinate me.

Additionally, as I read about the events of the world, the war and all the atrocities and lives lost and brutality endured, I consider how humanity continues to further perpetuate trauma onto others.

Trauma is a gut-punch, that gut-wrenching feeling that—I’ve learned—is present in almost every language—

Like when you watch your child die.

Like when that person you thought you couldn’t live without was killed suddenly in a car accident.

Like when someone rips off your clothes, overtakes your body, violates you.

Like when you watch your classmates get bodily blown to pieces by AK-47s.

I marvel at all the different ways that trauma can occur, to forever shape us.

I only wish that in our collective shared humanity, we could recognize that trauma, that pain in others. To use our shared collective understanding of grief and suffering to stop perpetuating such pain onto others. To do no harm. To see ourselves in the other.

It makes me wonder how I would feel if my family members had killed others.

My brother threatened to—shoot the police officer who was checking on him. He took his own life first.

I sometimes wonder if he would have been able to—my only sibling, also a pastor, a believer in God. How would that have been different? If the police were killed and my brother only injured, able to live on?

I wonder at our capacity to continue to hold and bear grief beyond what we thought ever possible, beyond what we thought ourselves capable of. I certainly have felt that way. And yet also, I recognize I have capacity for more.

And, also, how I cannot possibly imagine the experiences and embodied trauma of other grief, like the ones I wrote above.

The only solace I take away from all this somberness is this:

In what I’ve read about healing and processing from trauma, it is that when you are suffering and bereaved, traumatized and feel most broken, that there is also great potential…

Possibilities for great transformation, even greater growth, not only in ourselves, and for our own healing, but also —

For the ways in which we may grow ever more compassionate and empathetic, treating one another with kindness and love.

I do think it’s possible, but it also implies the inescapable truth that—

First, you’ve got to do the work. To heal.

Otherwise you continue to traumatize yourself and usually others around you.

“Whenever I see someone with an abundance of empathy, I want to ask what heartbreak they have endured, for compassion is often birthed in the valley of despair.”

~Zoe Clark-Coates