About dissociation : This testimony describes dissociation as a protective state in grief: the mind knows the loss, but the body and deeper awareness cannot fully accept it yet.
Reality stays close, like a door nearby, while the person slowly learns to approach it through love rather than only through pain.
The absence…thoughts…
Behind the fog of my brain, I knew it had happened.
Yet I couldn’t truly grasp it. The knowledge was there — but only on the surface, fragile and elusive, like a feather that never lands. It floated just above the reach of comprehension.
They say the mind cannot register what it does not know is possible.
And sudden death — the vanishing of someone you love — belongs to that impossible realm. The brain refuses to let it in. It circles around it, as if the truth were too blinding, too immense to be faced.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, I kept saying,
“I’m not dissociated. I know what happened.”
And still, somewhere deeper, my body and my mind resisted —
as if by not believing completely, I could keep the world from shattering.
Later, when I began to fall apart, I told my therapist:
“It feels as if the truth is in a room nearby. I can sense it there — I know exactly where the door is — but I’m paralyzed at the thought of opening it. Terrified of what might happen if I step inside… of collapsing.”
I knew that behind that door lived the unbearable — the finality, the silence, the absence with no way back.
Sometimes, I would half-open it, steal a glimpse of that reality,
and then, in a flash of panic, retreat —
flying backwards into the familiar fog where denial still offered a fragile sense of safety.
Though, on several occasions, I have entered that room and cried myself until I was completely drained. Most of the time, I still feel reality has not completely landed in my mind and body. I glimpse pictures and names, but cannot sustain the images. I recall moments, but they are like butterflies fluttering above me — souvenirs that I don’t want to ponder upon.
Yet, with time and without forcing, I am learning that I can stand in that room a little longer —
not to meet the pain again,
but to find my beloved there,
to find love rather than loss,
to let myself be bathed in that love,
and to sense how gently it can hold me,
how quietly it can help me live.
