I’ve written before about some issues I had related to painkillers, sense memory, and survivor’s guilt. Here’s a little more:

How does a widow process whatever emotion’s being pinged by some lower back pain brought on due to her spending a chunk of Saturday working on wiring while sitting on the ground? Like this I guess, because I didn’t really put that whole thought together until I started typing it. There’s always a reason certain things trigger such intense sense memories about my late husband. This time, it’s feeling what he felt. The image of him sitting on a chair, hunched over a circuit board, doing everything from soldering to writing notes to prodding it with some tool, trying to get it do what it was supposed to do, is still clear in my mind. There are any number of songs I could listen to that can invoke that memory. Some also make me recall the cats–the six “purrkids” we had. Or how much I miss having such a great clothesline that also produced some great icicles in the winter. And then I cry, because that part feels safe to miss. The rest, doesn’t.

But physical pain, it does things to us that we’d rather avoid. It forces us to feel things we’ve done our best not to feel. I know that there is a life I used to have that I’ll never get back. I’m fine with that, because I really love the life I have now. I honestly wouldn’t trade anything to get that old life back. I’m more myself that I have been for a couple decades, easily.

But the mind has to deal with that stuff, lest we suffer too much. So it uses sense memory, in part, to remind us that we need to make peace with past pain. It’s okay to put it to rest and move on, but you have to deal with it head-on first before you can have more control over how you deal with those sense memory triggers in the future. Sometimes it feels unfair, but it’s a fact that can’t be changed.