there was also no game postponement, no time given to process. it was impossible to continue, and yet we did, with calls to family, reliving the events of the day over and over, planning funeral arrangements, worrying about his kids, emptying his house. we continued on — because it felt like we should, because maybe others thought it was time, because it’s not considered normal or healthy to halt your life to give your heart the space it needs to process a traumatic event.
a friend said almost these exact words during the summer last year. she had finished both her last chemo treatment for breast cancer and the last community casserole that neighbours had been leaving on her porch every week for six months.
“what just happened?” she had asked. it had been a gruelling bunch of months with excruciating side effects, infections and disfiguring scars. her mom thought she should get back to her job as a teacher as soon as possible — “it’s good to get back into the swing of things,” she told her — but my friend just wanted to “chill”: “i just need a moment to figure out the hell i have just been through.”
it’s true we are conditioned in some ways to keep on going, pull up our socks and dust ourselves off, but maybe it’s healthier to just lie there for awhile in dusty overwhelm and just … think. and if you’re thinking that sounds weak, consider this:
people who are trained — trained! — to deal with trauma benefit from (and do better when) taking a proverbial knee after experiencing something terrible.
in her commentary on the impact of hamlin’s collapse on witnesses, dr. ilana stol, a geriatrics and palliative care physician in south carolina, writes about the stress and trauma of doing cpr from a doctor’s perspective. whether a patient dies or survives, she says, it’s important for physicians to pause in order to bring closure, decrease distress and make room to acknowledge feelings. so shouldn’t all of us take the doctor’s orders when facing our own traumas?