Dr. Betty Murray explains how grief doesn't fade but reshapes itself, emerging as irritability, exhaustion, and disrupted sleep. Hormonal changes like perimenopause can intensify these symptoms. She describes how the body often breaks down when stress finally releases, and how grief surfaces as sudden tears when the emotional backlog finds an outlet.
So grief doesn't wait for later. It just changes shape. And it also shows up with other things like the short temper you don't recognize in yourself, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix, and the sleep that doesn't repair. Because heaven forbid you're also in perimenopause and menopause, because that's probably already jacked up to begin with. It also doesn't fix as every time you got like a cold or flu, as soon as things calm down. I remember years ago when I was younger and I think Kind of God for the functional medicine training and everything else, because I was one of those people in my 30s that if I went on vacation, I got sick every time. And it was like, as soon as I took my foot off the gas, my body just fell apart. I don't do that today, but I remember doing that, you know, and how many women are like, yeah, as soon as I took the foot off the gas, I just physically fall apart. And if you're feeling like you're a hollowed-out shell and going through the motions and also checked out at the same time, or as the tears come out of nowhere over something completely unrelated, because that's not actually unrelated. That's the backlog finally finding a crack.
