Sons of the Shepherd

  The Brain and Grief: Navigating the Fog Part Two       The night of January 24th, 2024 will always be etched in my mind.  We should have been celebrating my son's oldest birthday, instead Tiffanie was being transported by ambulance to the York Hospital because of the amount of fluid that was building up on her heart.  That was the first domino that would fall that would lead to her passing ten months later.  It would also be the first day that grief would become a normal part of my vernacular.  I vividly remember that night.  Tiff was in the ambulance and she sent me home to pick up a few items from the house.  I remember calling people frantically, crying, hurting, and having an overflow of emotions.  I then had to drive over an hour to the hospital.  The drive was up mountain roads that I was unfamiliar with.  The fog was so thick.  I couldn't make out what was in front of me.  The road was still there, the s...

  Moving Forward vs. Moving On By John Walker ​       When you strip away the clinical jargon, the spiral usually stems from a total collapse of the infrastructure of a person's life. It isn’t just about sadness; it’s about the sudden, violent shift from a partnership to a forced singularity. You aren't just losing a person; you're watching the entire blueprint of your existence get shredded in real-time. It’s a violent, forced shift where the gravity of every single decision suddenly lands squarely on your chest. In the beginning, you’re just wandering through a survival fog. Your brain goes into "safe mode," operating on pure adrenaline and muscle memory, handling the funeral and nodding at people while your mind is suspended in a thick, grey cloud. You’re still reaching for that "Protective Shield" of your partner, not yet realizing the world is hitting you directly with no one left to buffer the blows. You’ve lost that sounding board, that "se...

  The Brain and Grief: When the Alarm Won't Turn Off Part One       When I was a boy my father and grandfather had to rewire his home.  Needless to say that was not a very easy job, it was quite complicated.  They had to follow certain paths to make the right connections.  It seemed like this job took a long time and needed special tender care.  Grief also does some major rewiring in the human brain.  People often equate grief as something that is purely emotional, but it is also incredibly neurological.  Grief puts the brain on overdrive, it overstimulates it, it's almost as if the brain was not created to endure such heaviness and pain.  Scientific studies now show that grief affects multiple systems of the brain at one time, which is unique because other  life experiences don't have a similar reactions neurologically.  I'm going to take some time over the next seven weeks and examine how grief affects different areas of...