I Am Not My Grief

One of my duties was to clean out or muck all the stalls in this 23-stall barn. One morning it was raining hard. All the horses were kept in their stalls. I was mucking out one stall when I received a pretty mean text. I felt really hurt emotionally and physically by the text and instantly the tears started flowing. I immediately thought of my grief. How the pain of losing one of the most important people in my life was yet again evident. Without realizing what was happening, I meshed the two experiences. I began overplaying in my mind the loss and how this horrible text message connected to my grief. I combined the two bad experiences, the mean text and the death, and the tears kept flowing.

When I say the text felt emotionally and physically painful, I meant it. Emotions like grief, anxiety, sadness mixed with physical sensations of gut-wrenching sickness and weak knees. My mind and body struggled to separate my grief and this negative experience.

I was still in the mist of discovering grief. At that time, I combined grief with every difficult or negative experience. My mind and body couldn’t separate or even differentiate any bad experience and the grief I was feeling.

So, there I was in this big stall, crying over a muck tub from a mean text. Feeling the overwhelming experience of grief creeping into my mind and body. When suddenly, I felt a little tickle on my ear then a nudge on my shoulder. I jolted upright, surprised at first, only to see it was the beautiful Gypsy Vanner whose stall I was cleaning. It was like the hand of Jesus touching my shoulder letting me know I was not alone. That Gypsy continued to nuzzle me until I pet her, and she graced me with her strong presence that I needed to find my balance. That Gypsy Vanner brought me back to the present moment. She did not judge or scoff or turn away. She embraced me and it felt like she was saying “you are not alone.”