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I Have No Words
And that is profoundly confusing for me. I have always had words. I was the second-grader who got in trouble for bringing a book into the girls’ bathroom so I could get to the end of my chapter. I was the third-grader whose teacher pulled her aside to say, “Honey, I know you have a lot to say, but can you practice waiting to say it later?”
I have always processed the entire world verbally. If I didn’t talk about it, I wasn’t sure it had really happened.
But I am out of words right now.
I feel stiff. I feel frozen. I feel as if every one of my deepest and most profound emotions is stuck in my throat.
I am learning that grief presents itself in strange ways.
When my Dad died, I cried and mourned and wrote about him and talked about him and somehow put everything in place.
But with the death of my Mom, I find myself at a loss for words.
It’s funny.
One of the many things that Mom and I shared was our love of the spoken and written word. We were both readers. We were both writers. We both preferred verbal puzzles to mathematical ones.
We were also both more emotional than logical. We both struggled to force our hearts to follow our brains, instead of the other way around.
