After dad died there wasn’t a sofa nearby that I didn’t want to pass out on.
My body wanted to go offline and recharge for a few months.
My neighbour lost her dad a month after mine on Christmas Day.
She was close to her dad too and it was a sudden death. I’d seen him the morning before dropping things off for Christmas dinner. Then he was gone.
My neighbour and I spoke quietly over the garden fence about our loss.
I told her about my extreme tiredness. But she was the opposite. She couldn’t get to sleep.
Wired and mind racing every night, unable to switch off.
But we were both off our food. Appetite vanished and uninterested in eating other than for basic fuel needs.
I didn’t realise how physical grief was until it hit me like a truck.
And it’s taken years to understand what shows up with each random grief wave.
Wait, grief is physical too?
Grief isn’t just an emotional tsunami that washes over you while you’re sobbing into a soggy tissue on the sofa.
It’s a full-body experience that makes you feel like you’ve been wiped off the board.
Even when you’re just standing still in your kitchen wondering why you went in there or realised you left the gas hob on for hours and grateful you didn’t burn the house down accidentally.
Oops, I did that a few times.
We’re pretty rubbish at discussing all the aspects of grief in our society until we are impacted by it.
Sure, everyone expects you to have a little cry, take some days off work, and then crawl back into life like you’ve just had a bad flu rather than experienced a soul-shattering loss.
My mates who’d gone through it knew the truth though. They told me to take my time and recognise how much it might impact various aspects of life.
But I don’t recall talking much about how grief actually feels in our physical bodies.
And not just the sleep disruption I’m sharing here.
But the gut issues, muscle aches and pains, constant colds and flus, skin problems or brain fog that descends when we’re trying to make sense of it all.
Your list might be different, but it’s rarely ever just emotional.
It’s confusing as heck.
The exhaustion no amount of sleep can fix
The physical manifestations of grief are totally bewildering.
One minute you’re kinda fine (for someone grieving), and the next minute your body is staging its own mutiny.
During COVID when dad died, most of us were still cooped up at home.
I could mooch about the house with my limited energy and log onto work during office hours through my laptop.
Once I left work and my coaching contract ended, I had no incentive to leave the house or interact with the world.
I felt as though I’d run a marathon, climbed a mountain, and moved house all in one day.
Except all I’d done was sit on the sofa and stare at the TV and wall for hours.
I’d get the urge to nap all the time and got into a daily sofa pass-out habit.
But that bone-deep fatigue isn’t laziness or depression (though it can sit alongside depression).
And I remember Googling depression symptoms because it felt like when I’d had depression in my 20s and 30s.
Heavy body, heart and no interest in going on.
But nope, it’s your body processing grief in the only way it knows how.
If grief is learning how life works for you now, your nervous system is working overtime trying to make sense of it all.
Working out how to survive and pay attention to the boring probate tasks you’re avoiding.
In my zombie-like state, I couldn’t focus, was irritable with my family, and wanted to crawl into a cave and hibernate.
So, grief’s intense learning process uses loads of energy to recalibrate to a world that suddenly makes no sense.
No wonder you need a nap after making a bloody cup of tea.
It’s basic body budget maths.
Permission to rest because your body needs it
I didn’t know grief meant a full-body shutdown.
We expect tears, maybe, sadness and longing, but not this exhaustion that makes existing feel like an endurance sport.
Whatever goes on for you, whether you can’t stay awake or can’t get to sleep, your body is trying to process something impossible.
This is totally normal. And it’s how bereavement does its work.
It won’t fix itself overnight. It might take months or longer.
But the key point here is to listen to what your body needs, even if that’s just staring at the wall for three hours.
Rest isn’t weakness.
It’s how you survive this difficult process and come out the other side.
P.S. I'm creating a 60-minute(ish) on-demand workshop to help you Navigate Grief With Compassion. Hit reply or comment below if you want to be one of the beta users to help me build and review it.
Thank you for sharing these insights, Sabrina. Grief is so isolating because we are unprepared for how intense it is. People are very kind in the immediate aftermath, but we don't understand how life changing it is until it happens to us.
Glad I stumbled upon your work! Lost my dad in April, now in pre-grief for my mom who is declining--diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer that's gone to her brain and lymph nodes in February, given months maybe weeks to live. She's outlived the prognosis, still living independently with no pain. Didn't expect that, but man we're grateful. Recently, though, she's been having dizzy spells and yesterday said it might be time to start thinking about assisted living. "Not today," she said. "But... sometime." She's lived a full life at 85. But man, it's still tough. Look forward to reading more of your work.