Time Heals All Wounds, but At What Cost?
On my way to the market the other day, I thought about my mom and grief. When I say this, you might imagine that this thought just occurred to me in the same manner as you might remember, out of the blue, a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while. But no. Grief, sadness, and my mom’s absence are all I think about.
These thoughts permeate my mind, and sometimes, it feels like I’m obsessed with the concept of death. It’s all I want to write about: death, grief, sadness, and all the ways it changes a person. All of my stories end in death or are about death. My thoughts are punctuated by death, separated by the commas that are different shades of grief. There is no escaping my pain. It is living, breathing, co-existing, sometimes dependently, with me. I think it is a part of me now.
On this particular day, I was thinking about grief and time. It’s been six months since my mother died. A lot of things have happened between then and now, like seeing her one last time, laying her to rest, packing up her room, building a tomb of myself, and burying my pain and me. After those first few days of terror and shock, I settled into a fugue state that did not leave for six months. I am only now starting to desire life, and it is painful.
But something stuck with me from those first few days—a phrase: " Time will heal you.”
When someone you love dies, the first thing well-wishers tell you is that time will heal. You don’t believe them because your emotions are a wave too high, too big, too powerful for you to ever imagine they will diminish. They don’t. Maybe they do. But one thing is certain: time does help. Now, I do not know whether time helping is a curse or a blessing. But here’s what I know: human beings are built to withstand. We are an irony — a mind of only the purest of steel encased in a fragile body. Truly, if one masters the power of the mind, they have mastered the world. Nothing has made this clear to me more than grief. And perhaps this is why I am failing at living. My emotions have always been a tsunami threatening the sovereignty of my logical mind, and I am the valley in which they both fight for dominance. And so you will forgive me when, on some days, I find it hard to get out of bed, to live.
I almost ran mad the day my mother died. My mind led a revolt against itself, called on memories I hoped to make, and stared into a future of barren seconds, minutes, hours, and years. She turned off all the lights and plunged us both into the depths of madness and night. I don’t know if I can make you understand. In the second that the logical part of me understood she wasn’t coming back, I teetered on the brink of full-on insanity.
My mind and I have always had a complicated relationship, but what happened that day has never happened before. She gave up on me. My mind chose insanity.
I think that thoughts are like a moving vehicle. Some people cruise along nicely, some drive just within the speed limit, and some barely even move at a sloth’s pace. For me, my mind has always been on the highway, music blaring at the highest volume, windows down, hair dancing in the wildness of the wind. But on this day, the brakes malfunctioned. My thoughts zoomed at an alarming speed, their volume growing louder and louder by the minute, until I was a cacophony of senses, a ball of chaos. I had to manually reset multiple times by saying “STOP” out loud.
Looking back now, I idly wonder sometimes why people don’t run mad from grief. I think it’s two things. One, whether or not we feel prepared or whether or not we know, our minds are built to grieve. So, I presume some mechanism built into us springs into action and keeps us on this side of sanity. I also believe that this mechanism is disbelief. If we were to truly understand and accept death when it occurs, far too many of us would have lost our minds to the safety of insanity.
Two people. There’s so much you understand in hindsight, and with such a chaotic moment as grief, the epiphanies are endless. When my mother died, I was not allowed to grieve. It was not that I did not cry because I did. It was that I was not allowed to descend into despair. People from the church came, although it was a Thursday and a work day. They sat in our parlor and said a lot of things that I did not hear. But the one I remember was when a woman sat me down and said, “You’ll cry all your life, now is the time to be strong and alert”. I didn’t understand then what she meant, although the meaning has been seeping into my consciousness in warm, silent trickles over the past six months. She was just passing on to me the wisdom that others had passed unto her. But why? Why should I not let grief splinter me, breaking out of my skin like a volcanic eruption of blood and pain? I think it is because if you lose yourself in those first few days, you’ll never be able to return. And if you do return, you’ll wake up to realize that years have passed and you have not.
I took their advice and procrastinated my pain. I am not certain this was the wisest decision to make because, in putting away my pain, I froze my emotions in a cryogenic chamber. And I am yet to unlock it, not for lack of trying, but because I do not know how.
The first month after my mom passed, I was busy. Planning a funeral, holding the tattered edges of my sanity together, fighting terror in my dreams and waking moments. But the funeral came and passed, and life settled like sand at the bottom of a water-filled jar. I did not know what to do with myself without a focus, and so I let go. But instead of falling into the warm arms of insanity, nothingness cradled me. At first, every breath was heavy without her. Her absence grew, took up space in the house, and threatened to suffocate me. I stayed up all night and slept during the day so I wouldn’t miss her too much. I made a prison out of my room and locked myself up in there. I cried a lot, too. The better way to describe it is ‘wail’. I shed tears I’d never shed before, and made sounds I’d never made before. I descended into the depths of darkness, and I have no desire to recount. And I was certain that I did not want to live without her. Not because I was suicidal, but because I just did not want to be here.
Six months down the line, I’m on my way to the market, and I realise that they were right, those well-wishers. Time has done its thing. I may not be healed, but my soul is no longer groaning in a fetal position every day. My spirit is not quite hungry for life, but it is beginning to understand that we didn’t die when Mama did. And when something still occupies space on this side of life, it lives. And that is what we’re trying to do — live, as difficult a task as that is.
Although time is doing its job, I am not sure if I am happy or not. A lot of times, I feel like I’m betraying my love for her by living. Time heals you by making you accept that they are gone. At first, the acceptance bows your back and cracks your spine until you are crouched on the floor, groaning in newfound pain. In accepting their death, you splinter your soul into smaller pieces because acceptance feels a lot like validation. Acceptance is you agreeing to live without them, to pursue life and joy, and happiness without them. To fight acceptance is to say to your loved one, “I do not agree with your death.” And this is how life is cruel. You must accept their death if you want to live, or grief will haunt you so much you’ll be dead even as you live. Acceptance is the only logical conclusion to your grief. So yes, time heals all wounds, but at what cost?
Ekele Jinanwa is a writer from Abia State, Nigeria. She writes a bit of everything, from short stories to poems and letters. Her goal is to write the things she wants to hear in the hopes that someone else who needs to hear it, reads it.
You can check out her other works on Medium @EkeleJinanwa.