Journal Entry from August 22, 2024
Thirteen years ago, I fell out of a tree and shattered my body. For the last few days, I’ve felt an ache in my ribs—a rickety feel in my pelvis and femur, like my leg could suddenly be disjointed. My joints have hurt more. I wondered what was happening - and then, I remembered the date. August 22. It was when I fell 70 ft out of the pine tree in Minnesota. I didn’t make the connection until after meditation this morning. I wanted to listen to a stream, a river, running water moving through. The movement of water brings health, restoration, and healing. Every year that passes, I am reminded of how fragile life can be. TJ was the first person at my bedside after that accident. And now, thirteen years later, I am grieving the loss of him, too. I am so young. I am 31. I feel the immense weight of a severed life lost. The ache of a broken past dwells in my bones. My ribs hurt, my wrist hurts, my stomach hurts, my hip hurts, my heart… hurts. And yet, I keep going like you said I should.
I am studying grief and loss in my master’s program - and it’s interesting to learn from an academic perspective the things I have known to be true in my body. The Body Keeps the Score. I am reading textbooks by doctors, therapists, social workers, and psychologists describing the sensations in my body.
The body remembers.
I get dates wrong all the time. Numbers? Forget about it. When my brother and I were younger and living in Minnesota, we had a landline phone. I remember somebody calling for him and asking me to leave him a message. They left their phone number. I wrote the note and the number, but when he went to return the call, it didn’t connect. He discovered soon after that the number I wrote down was ONE NUMBER OFF.
He smiled at me lovingly. Em, he said, you wrote down the wrong number - but you were only one number off.
“So close,” I said.
When we are walking through grief, which is a lifelong process, we are going to experience physical symptoms. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Even though it has been thirteen years - this year fourteen years - since my accident, I still feel it in my bones. And my brother’s loss? I had a similar experience two months before writing this journal entry. It was the middle of June - and I was going to teach a yoga class on the beach. I have been teaching yoga on the beach for three summers, so I have a system - and it’s typically pretty seamless now. But not that day.
I woke up depressed. I was rushing. I forgot something at the house and had to turn around. A massive truck was coming at me and blared its horn at me. My heart was racing. I couldn’t get myself to calm down. I made it to the yoga class and just felt off. Something was off.
Packing up after the class, all the sweet young girls were thankful and gracious. I looked at my phone and got a text from my childhood best friend.
All it said was, “I am thinking of you and with you today.”
I couldn’t even put all the yoga mats away; I broke down crying.
It was the day of my brother’s passing.
I cried the entire drive back to work - and took the rest of the day off.
It had been three years since his death.
Even though I am date- and memory-challenged (thanks, TBI!), my body knows. She remembers. She never forgets. And she brings my focus back to my body every year - and I respond.
I did feel an amount of shame and embarrassment when I had to call off work that day, but when I went home - barely able to make it because I was crying so hard, I knew I’d made the right choice for myself.
Be kind to your spiritual being, having a human experience.
This shit ain’t for the weak.
Love,
Em
HEALING THROUGH WRITING
I am starting a new thing on each of my Substack posts - and it is inspired by a project I am doing in my master’s program. I am giving a presentation on working with grief through writing - so I will share a prompt every week for you to use if you’d like to support you in your grief journey.
Prompt: Write down how you experience grief in your body. What are your symptoms? What can you do to support your physical body during a time of intense grieving?
Read my book! If you’re interested in reading my book - in which I cover my true, honest, painful experience with loss - check it out. REVIEWS help me a ton, so please leave an honest review if you haven’t done so already.
Previews are available on Amazon - as well as the Kindle version.
My book is also available at Barnes & Noble - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/start-here-emilee-mae-struss/1142682597
And BookBaby - https://store.bookbaby.com/book/start-here1?srsltid=AfmBOoqrPj9sv4tpwm_ITqmQNQd0wuShlI1nPCDv857muxHD3_TW8EV8