I have been working full time this week as I slowly try to get through my backlog. While based on the feedback I have been getting, the work I have been doing has been good, it has been taking a huge amount out of me. Even with a daily 1 1/2-2 hour nap, I have been ready to go to sleep at 8pm. This morning I woke up and felt kind of like myself again. My brain felt like a fog had lifted and I suddenly remembered how to think.
I attribute this amazing turn-around to my dear friend Aja and the shiatsu massage she gave me yesterday. Aja is a Five Element Acupuncturist who specializes in grief and loss (among many, many other things). Aja has been my acupuncturist for years and I have always said she has a magic touch. But this is a new high for her. I could never in my wildest dreams imagine that I could go from feeling the way yesterday to the way I feel today.
Between my near constant travel from mid-December through last week, my father’s relatively rapid deterioration and passing I had pretty much shut down both emotionally and physically. I could do the basics and nothing more. That was true for grieving as well. I felt like I just didn’t have the capacity to process what had happened.
I couldn’t get past the image of my father struggling to breathe during his last couple of days. But that wasn’t my father as I knew him. That was my father’s shell putting everything he had into simply drawing breath. Aja’s gift to me was reopening my mind to the father that I knew and loved until the end. My father as he has always been to me: beard, glasses and all*.
*Although my father shaved his beard during my adolescence and switched to contact lenses when I was in college, when I picture him in my mind he always has his beard and glasses.