My dear friend Julie Roxanne recently introduced me to Blursday, the day of the week we have been living in for the past year as we have isolated and worked from home to survive a pandemic. The weekends and weekdays blur together to form a surreal, dreamlike farce of a time period. A month? More like a Meh. She made a beautiful, artistic rendering of a “Covember” calendar attuned to this nonsensical time and allowed me to share it here:

This foggy sense of time looks familiar to me because of my experiences with grief. Driving home from the hospital...hanging up on a “bad news” phone call...resuming trips to the grocery store...gathering strength to socialize again… all of these mundane moments after a significant loss can be witnessed with this same blurry lens. 

In the book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, Claudia Hammond explains our experience of Time as the following: “We are creating our own perception of time, based on the neuronal activity in our brains with input from the physiological symptoms of our bodies.” It is only natural, therefore, that the stress, adrenaline, inflammation, increased blood pressure, literal heartache, and physical pain of grief can significantly impact our experience of Time. 

Grief follows no timeline, but if it did, would we who mourn recognize the time passing?