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I tend to think in metaphors and that tendency was never stronger than in the first two years after Ryan’s death.

In the early days I felt as if I was lugging around an enormous suitcase of sorrow. I longed to set it down somewhere but it was permanently attached to the end of my arm. I wanted to close my eyes and rest, dropping off the heavy baggage for someone else to carry for a while. Friends would say to me “I wish I could carry your grief for just one day to give you a rest.” I wished that too but it wasn’t possible. I knew somehow that the most I could hope for was that someday the enormous roller bag of grief would be a small carry-on size.

I thought of myself as an egg. As I would drive to work or fly across the country, I would think of myself either as a raw egg – fragile, easily cracked and liable to ooze out all over anyone nearby; or a soft boiled egg – not strong but also not as weak as on my raw egg days; and occasionally I would have a hard boiled day when I could make it through most of the day without continual sobbing.

Grief is hard and exhausting work. I was tired all the time. Many days I felt as if I was wearing one of those lead apron things they put on you at the dentist’s office for x-rays.

When you are trying to recover from a loss as big as the one we suffered, you often think you’re making no progress. The healing definitely isn’t linear. In other words, it doesn’t get a little better every day. It’s more like a “two steps forward, one step back or one step forward, two steps back” process. Someone described the grieving process to me as similar to climbing a spiral staircase. You keep coming back to the same spot though you are a little higher each time. That thought often kept me going when I felt I was stuck in the quagmire of sorrow.

I thought of myself as an amputee. Losing Ryan was like losing a leg. I knew I would likely learn to walk again with the use of crutches or a prosthetic device but I would always be an amputee. And the phantom pain was excruciating.

I thought of my pain as a gaping wound – an open sore. It ached and throbbed 24/7. And just when it would begin to scab over a bit, something would bump against it, knocking the scab off and the bleeding would start all over again.

Some days my need to cry reminded me of what needing to throw up feels like when you’re ill. Most of my life I had avoided vomiting if at all possible. I would lie still with a wet cloth on my head in a dark room or whatever I thought would prevent that scary, uncomfortable feeling of being out of control. But once I threw up, I always felt better - if only for a little while. Weeping was like that. After the first 5 months, I didn’t cry all the time. But some times I needed to cry to release the sadness and pent up emotion. I was tired of crying and hated the feeling of being totally out of control of my emotions. But almost always, I would feel better afterwards. Emptied, exhausted, wiped out, but better in a strange way.