The Physics of Grief

When grief hits, gravity goes. I looked into the impact of loss on my sense of direction, time, and space.

When I got the call five years ago that my young, healthy father had suffered a massive and fatal heart attack, the floor fell out from under my feet.

Nothing could convince me otherwise: There was no ground. As I shouted out, I don’t remember my matted grey college dorm carpet being under my knees anymore. Like a trap door had been pulled, I was simply falling in zero gravity.

For a while, I felt there was no stable ground to support me. In poems I later wrote, recalling that flashback with PTSD-level severity, I documented “the ground shaking with every step I took, threatening to swallow up everything above and drag it down below.”

This was my down. In my nightmares I was falling over invisible ledges, as if magnetized to the depths below.

And as my grief evolved over the coming weeks and years, my brain did strange things. I felt bizarre and stirring waves of the physical world around me shapeshifting to accommodate my loss. These feelings are normal, healthy, and rooted in self-preservation, until they aren’t. Our bodies are amazing at protecting us from overwhelming grief — one of the few times in life when our physical and…