Living In Her Own Head

Ginger Johnson

Jul 2

I've wondered why my Meemaw refused to do anything by the end of her life. She had financial independence and a loving family that would have made whatever she asked for possible, but she seemed stuck. She refused to travel or try any new experiences. Soon she stopped doing anything uncomfortable: no shopping or church, no cleaning or picking up her room. After a while she chose to stay in her bed and read rather than do any of the activities that she had enjoyed for years. In her last years she wouldn't even walk a few steps or go sit outside. It was frustrating. I felt such sadness each time we visited her (2-3 times every week). Where was the intellectual, fierce woman I'd known growing up? Where had she gone?

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk explains that when a person loses connection with their body, they no longer find it a source of pleasure and comfort. They cease to recognize their body as a part of themselves that needs care. Because our bodies are how we experience the outside world, and because the person feels unsafe in their own body, they begin to see the world as unsafe and so they reject it. This traps them in a prison of scarcity and fear. They don't try new things because they believe that new things will fail, and they reject people, too, which prevents them from finding a way out of the misery that they wish to escape.

Because our bodies are how we experience the outside world, and because the person feels unsafe in their own body, they begin to see the world as unsafe and so they reject it. This traps them in a prison of scarcity and fear. They don't try new things because they believe that new things will fail, and they reject people, too, which prevents them from finding a way out of the misery that they wish to escape.

When I read that, something clicked in me. Meemaw couldn't move without pain, and over time the pain deepened to the point it was constant, whether or not she moved. Eventually, after countless fruitless doctor visits, it seemed as if she had divorced herself from her body entirely. She stopped bathing. She stopped worrying about having her clothes washed. She wore the same thing every day. Perhaps that was why she was so distant and rejecting of us in her final years. She certainly seemed scared and cranky much of the time. I was reminded of a feral cat: cringing, hissing and aloof by turns.

I feel so much compassion for her: scared, in pain and all alone when she didn't need to be.