Like everything in our world, grief is energy. It gives us information. In grief the existence of every emotion is possible.

Grief is missing our Person. It affects us in unimaginable ways… A hole has been created within us…an emotional hole and a loss of identity, the identity that is part of our personhood. This produces the body-brain issues, the change in brain chemistry, hormones, etc.

The lungs are the main organ to hold grief according to my TCM doc, although not exclusively. My lung grief affects my shoulders, in turn affecting my arms and so on. At times it tires me and my shoulders sag. Then I need to rest.

As that area of my body releases more over the months, the shoulder sagging has become rare. The other evening I noticed a bit of sagging after being awake and up for twelve hours, a vast improvement.

Alone after 43 years with my soulmate, I have a fear of disappearing… to myself and to others. Part of me really has ‘disappeared’…my old identity.

I feel vulnerable, there is no one to look out for me. It’s ironic in a way…I’m fearful that I can’t do it, live without Don…even though I have been managing successfully for several years.

Covid has changed people’s perception of time it seems. Somehow the “covid culture” of alienation, combined with my protective body-mind grief dissociation, makes everything seem odder.

We never know how grief is going to show up. Shulman, a neurologist, said after losing her soulmate: “I expected [the planned trip] to Greece to be unbearable sadness, but it wasn’t…It was profound instability…Losing bearings, losing identity, losing your coherent self.”  

The disorientation of deep grief is an altered state where our minds strain to make order out of unfamiliar events, Shulman goes on to say. As the months went on, and my brain rewired itself to a new normal, my mind became much clearer.

I resisted the idea of having a psychic reading with my friend Alma for thirteen months after Don left us, sensing she would tell me something I did not want to hear. I was right. Alma told me Don wanted me to let go of my sadness.

We are well aware that grief doesn’t work that way, we can’t just decide to let go of it.  

The next day as I prepared food in my kitchen, Alma’s words came back to me and I became angry. Alma was the messenger, it was not her I was angry with, it was Don. I remember quite clearly saying “Screw You” to him as I stood at the kitchen sink.

My anger helped shift me forward. Later I explained to him that things worked differently “down here” from the energetic environment that was now his home.

Guilt was an occasional visitor in the early days and still occasionally, but I did not let it take hold of me. “I must have done something wrong for Don to become so ill and die was the thought that crossed my mind. “This is not your fault”, he told me, and I wrote it in red in my journal.” What Don said sunk in deeper at that point in time.

To me the guilt and “if onlies” are just an extension of my magical belief that if we could redo our life we would gain time and would have many more years together.  

When grievers have experienced multiple traumas in their lives as I have, growing a new life is a complicated task sometimes. The negative experiences that were held at bay to a degree during our lives with our soulmates come to the forefront now. Additionally, I believe that my soul is releasing past life experiences as I move forward spiritually.

Excerpted from a work in progress, Working title: Then: When my Life Fell Apart

C Ellen Besso 2025