Cry It Out
I was in a bad car accident yesterday. I walked away (as did the other driver, thankfully) relatively unscathed. I was really, really lucky.
It was sunny and bright as my Kia approached the intersection. I was trying to cross a road with traffic coming both directions but I’d crossed this particular intersection hundreds of times. I thought I looked both ways but I clearly did not see the driver coming on my right and basically pulled out from the stop sign and we collided less than a second later. There was no time to be scared or to react. The front end of my car was pretty much torn off.
After the car came to a stop, I instantly began to sob. I pushed my way out of the damaged door and got over on the side of the road and could not stop crying. My boyfriend was there in 5 minutes (as I had just left his house) and even though he tried to comfort me, I could not stop. I talked to the police and exchanged information, called my sister and my insurance company and I still could not stop.
I spent the rest of the day trying to calm down, resting on a heating pad with my foot up as it was bruised in the accident. I watched Netflix and tried to distract myself. But still the tears came. I was safe. No one was seriously injured. The car was insured. What was going on?
In earlier pods and blogs, I shared that I lost my dad in August to cancer. My sister, Lissa, is in a grief group at her church. She is learning a lot about grief and the way it functions and sometimes shares bits of her discoveries with me.
She texted this morning to ask how I was doing. I told her that I was still uber-emotional. Something got triggered in the trauma of the crash and activated my tear ducts and now they were malfunctioning - faulty and broken - seemingly irreparable. She replied that because it was a trauma, my experience was totally understandable. She said the book they are using in their group talks about emotions being nearer the surface after a loss. She mentioned it was in the chapter called “You’re Not Crazy.”
After dad died, I don’t recall crying very much. I had cried a lot before he died, but it was more about the state of our relationship than about his illness. I don’t know if this accident released something deeper in me, but the sadness feels overwhelming. As we head back into lockdown, perhaps I’m mourning even more than his death. We are all mourning so much this year, it’s no wonder our emotions are right at the surface; like an overflowing bathtub with the faucet still running.
This morning when I went around the corner to grab a coffee, I burst into tears. When I told the lovely woman taking my order what had happened, she encouraged me to cry it out. Perhaps we all need to ‘cry it out’ in whatever way we can- hopefully without waiting for further trauma to give us permission.
On our last podcast, Tony and I talked about new or renewed practices that we are trying to engage in over this four week quarantine ‘freeze’ in Portland. Maybe contemplation or creativity or relationship can help you mourn. I truly hope so.
Today, I am profoundly grateful for my life. Perhaps by the time I gather with my mom and sister on Thanksgiving, the tears will have run dry. Even if they haven’t, I will give thanks.
