🌙 WEEK 9 — The First Days of Grief: How I Survived What Should Have Broken Me (October 2021 – 2022)

Healing Journey Series — From Darkness to Light

There are moments in life when everything before and everything after becomes separated by a single breath.

For me, that moment was October 21, 2021 — the day I lost Zack.

Nothing in my life — not losing my mother at eight years old, not the loss of my grandparents, aunts, uncles or family, not the loss of my biological father and his family while they were still alive, not trauma, not abuse, not illness, not crisis —

prepared me for the pain of losing a child.

The shock didn’t come first.

The truth did.

And it hit like a force that knocked the air out of my body.

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⚫ The Days That Didn’t Feel Real

People talk about grief like it’s an emotion.

It’s not.

It’s physical.

It hurts in your chest, in your stomach, in your bones.

I couldn’t breathe, think, eat, or function.

I was in pure survival mode.

The first night, I drank until I passed out —

not because I wanted to escape,

but because I didn’t know how to face what had just happened.

The next day was worse.

My body felt hollow and heavy at the same time.

I walked around like I wasn’t inside myself.

And then came the moment that could’ve taken my life.

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⚫ The Day I Didn’t Know How to Stay

The day after I lost Zack, the pain became unbearable.

I left my home knowing I didn’t know how to come back to a life without my son. I said goodbye. I felt lost in the world, disoriented, and overwhelmed by grief that had no edges.

I reached out for help wherever I could. I called a church, hoping someone would understand the urgency of what I was facing. I tried to explain that I didn’t have “tomorrow” in me — that I was in survival mode, second by second. But I was told to come back another day.

I called an aunt and stayed on the phone briefly, circling, unsure of where I was going or what to do next. Everything felt too big. Too loud. Too heavy.

The last thing I could imagine was calling emergency services. I didn’t want intervention — I wanted the pain, the thoughts, and the intensity inside my body to stop.

What finally helped was reaching someone who understood trauma and how grief lives in the nervous system. With her support, I found myself sitting quietly under a tree in a park, breathing again. That moment didn’t fix anything. But it grounded me enough to stay.

That was one of the first times I faced grief without numbing myself — without alcohol, without escape — and it was one of the hardest moments I’ve ever lived through.

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⚫ The Heartbreak That Nearly Stopped My Heart

Two days after Zack passed,

my chest tightened so hard I thought I was having a heart attack.

My blood pressure shot up,

my heart rate went crazy,

and I felt like my body was going into shock.

I was scared —

but I didn’t know what to do.

I called acupuncturists, doctors, anyone.

No one answered.

I went outside with my phone still in my hand,

and without realizing what I was doing,

I sat down and started digging my fingers into the dirt.

It wasn’t intentional.

It wasn’t planned.

It was instinct.

And that moment — that grounding —

began to slow my breathing,

lower my heart rate,

and bring me back into my body.

That day, grounding literally kept me alive.

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⚫ Second by Second — Because I Couldn’t Do Day by Day

People kept telling me:

“Take it day by day.”

But they didn’t understand.

In grief that deep, a single day feels impossible.

So I broke time down into pieces I could manage:

• 1 second

• then 1 minute

• then maybe an hour

That was it.

That was all I could handle.

And somehow, those seconds turned into minutes,

those minutes turned into hours,

and slowly, the hours became weeks.

I wasn’t healing —

I was simply surviving.

But sometimes, surviving *is* the healing.

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⚫ The Memorial, the Wine, and the Shift

On the day of Zack’s memorial,

I couldn’t do it sober.

I drank a whole bottle of wine

just to get through the heartbreak.

But something changed on the day of his celebration of life.

It was like a quiet voice inside me said:

“This is not how we honor him.

This is not how we walk forward.”

And I made a choice —

not to pretend the pain didn’t exist,

but to face it fully.

I didn’t want alcohol to become the thing I leaned on again.

I didn’t want to hide from grief.

I wanted to honor Zack with clarity, not numbness.

That day became the first day I chose to feel everything —

even when it hurt.

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⚫ What My Psychology and Healing Training Taught Me

All the years I spent studying psychology —

learning about trauma, the mind, emotions, attachment,

and how people process grief —

I didn’t know it at the time,

but all of that education was preparing me for this.

Not to take the pain away — nothing can —

but to help me understand what was happening

inside my mind and my body.

I knew I was experiencing:

• shock

• dissociation

• trauma response

• emotional shutdown

• survival mode

And because I understood it,

I didn’t judge myself for it.

Holistic healing also played a role —

my breathwork, grounding, self-awareness, intuition —

all the tools I had learned became the rope I held onto in the dark.

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⚫ Zack’s Presence in the Darkness

Even in the hardest moments,

I felt him.

I felt him grounding me in ways he never did in life.

I felt his strength beside me.

I felt the bond between us changing —

not disappearing.

That connection is what helped me survive

the nights I thought I wouldn’t make it through.

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💫 Takeaway:

Grief didn’t break me —

it transformed me.

It forced me to face every part of myself —

my pain, my strength, my trauma, my resilience.

It taught me that healing isn’t clean or pretty.

It’s shaky, slow, messy, and painful.

But it’s real.

And it’s something I continue to live into.