After losing Mitch, the speaker fought to keep grief from defining their family. Processing the loss, focusing on memories, and practicing gratitude helped rewire their mind. Grief had physical costs: shingles, gray hair, broken teeth from grinding. Reframing the trauma gradually eased both the emotional and physical pain.
That began this intense desire that I had to show myself and my family that we didn't have to be sort of our future didn't have to be written by the traumatic thing that we had just experienced. Because as long as we could process it and think about it in a way that we could can. That we could get on top of, think about things about Mitch that we loved and we remembered and the parts of him that we wanted to honor and the stuff that wouldn't die even though his body had it and all that stuff, as long as we could make ourselves think about that and be grateful for his life, then we had a chance for our brain to start producing different stuff and our bodies to start feeling different. And in the two weeks after Mitch died, I had developed shingles in my right shoulder that I still feel sometimes. Sometimes today, my hair turned gray. Like I broke several of my molars in my mouth from grinding my teeth at night. Like my body was reacting to that trauma. And in the months following that, when I learned to process that and think about it in a different way, I began to be able to get on top of some of that stuff.
