My Body Was Still Holding Grief. Twelve Years Later.

The Hike

I went on a hike in Yosemite a few months ago. Nothing too extreme, but a lot for me. Steep enough to feel it in my legs, long enough to feel it in my lungs.

I came home, and I couldn't stand up straight.

The pain settled into my hip and low back and stayed there for days. I tried stretching. I tried meds. I tried creams and ice. I tried resting. Nothing eased the pain.

After a conversation with my coach mentor, I got down on my bedroom floor. I set up the most supportive child's pose I could find. Every prop and pillow I could find under me. When my head hit the pillow, the tears fell.

I didn't know what I was crying about, not exactly. But I knew, somewhere underneath the not knowing, that it had something to do with stored grief.

Twelve Years of This

My daughter was stillborn twelve years ago. Full term pregnancy, no warning, no explanation. Six weeks later, my dad died of a heart attack. In the years since, my family has moved through a divorce, more deaths, job losses, infertility. A decade that asked a lot of us.

The Story I Was Told

You'd think twelve years is long enough. Long enough that grief would have quieted down, filed itself away, stopped showing up uninvited on a random Tuesday after a hike. That's the story I was told. Give it time. You'll heal. You'll move on. Eventually you'll get to the other side of it.

And while how I experience my grief has shifted. It still resides in my body.

After moving through over a decade of grief, I’m starting to believe there’s no “other side”. Grief doesn't have an ending. It changes. The intensity softens. But it doesn't leave, and I've come to believe it was never supposed to.

Grief Doesn't Get Healed. It Gets Carried.

What shifted for me on that floor wasn't, “great now I'm done”. It was an understanding that grief resides in my body. I’ve done a ton of therapy, read the books, worked with a life coach, and I’m a very introspective person.

But what I didn’t understand was that grief doesn't get “healed”. It gets carried. When we're not actively attending to it, when we push it down or distract ourselves from it, it doesn't disappear. It goes into the body and waits.

That's not a metaphor. My hips and low back held something for over a decade until I finally gave it the attention it needed.

We're taught to avoid our feelings. Push them down. Stay busy. Get back to normal. We treat our feelings like an inconvenience. They're not. They're information.

What I Choose Now

I didn't choose to be the mother of a stillborn child. That's not a sentence I get to rewrite. It’s an irreversible loss for me.

But I do get to choose what I do with the truth grief has shown me since. And what it's shown me, again and again, is what actually matters and what never did.

If you're carrying a loss, whatever kind, I don't think the goal is to get over it. I think the goal is learning how to carry it, and staying close enough to ask what it's trying to show you.

A Place to Listen

I didn't know my hips were holding grief until I finally stopped long enough to feel it. You don't find what your body's been carrying by pushing through it. You find it by getting still.

What is your body still holding onto? I'd love to know. Tell me in the comments.

If you want a place to actually sit with the answer, the 10 Day Reset is ten days of that kind of stillness. A few minutes a day to quiet the noise long enough to hear what you've been carrying too. No fixing. Just space to listen.