Grief barged in at 3:18 a.m. It wasn’t too surprising—I’ve been slamming the door in its face for a week.
Facebook shows me Spanish tortilla with red peppers and peas. I want to read how the Cook’s Illustrated staff iterated to create the perfect dish, but know it will fill me with unbearable longing. I do not click through. Slam!
A character in a book mentions traveling to Ireland. Unbidden images of rolling green fields and castles fill my thoughts. Slam! The door is closed before I even realized it had opened.
But Grief keeps pushing its way in. Australia, New Zealand, Patagonia, Iceland—all the places I long to go, all the places I’ve been trying to avoid thinking of—scroll through my mind. Slam!
I throw my back against the door to prevent it from opening again.
Still, scones, chocolate chip cookies, and multigrain bread work their way into my thoughts. Slam! I cannot staunch these visions quickly enough. Not only can I not eat these foods, I cannot bear to bake them. The double loss threatens to invite Grief to become my roommate.
My efforts aren’t enough, so I erect a more permanent barricade in front of the door.
My therapist asks me to rate how severely I am grieving on a scale of 0-10. “Seven, when I let it in,” I say. After some back and forth, she tells me I am responding to my emotions skillfully. That to see Grief pounding on the door and choose to leave it on the doorstep because I can’t deal with the imposition is a healthy reaction.
The barricade works. What a relief.
Grief slips in through the forgotten crack at the bottom of the door.
Attempting to add pomegranate to my foods-I-can-eat list, I am rewarded with six hours of a migraine attack. I go grocery shopping when the attack lets up. Grief climbs into the cart and fastens the seat belt.
I try to push Grief aside as I fill the cart with the foods I can eat: romaine lettuce, butter lettuce, asparagus, red peppers, green peppers, watermelon, chicken breast, cream, butter. That’s it. Grief laughs. It reminds me over and over how fucking unfair it is that eating is my migraine trigger. It tells me I will never again eat peaches without paying in pain. It says that all my work to determine my triggers won’t actually result in fewer migraine attacks.
Grief hangs out for several hours. I feel boring and needy as I register the same old complaints with Hart. I have nothing new to tell him on this front. Grief keeps coming back for the same reasons it did last month, last year, last decade. No matter how much great work I do in therapy, Chronic Migraine keeps calling Grief and inviting it over.
Talking to Hart makes me feel better. I choose to change the subject and toss Grief to the curb again. Slam! I put the barricade back up and shove a towel in the crack under the door.
I find Grief lying in bed beside me when I roll over at 3:18 a.m. I’m too tired to try to kick it out. We talk for a couple hours, then Grief lets me go back to sleep. I suspect the reprieve will be short.
I awake in the morning to see the door hanging by its hinges. I can no longer deny Grief entry into my home. It is adamant that I entertain it right this second.
Grief and I have spent so much time together that I know exactly what to expect. Grief will detail everything I have lost to migraine, it will predict a future based on past scenarios, it will remind me that my actions have been futile thus far. I will cry until I am spent. Grief will ignore my exhaustion and overstay its welcome. (To do otherwise would be impossible; we both know it was never welcome.)
After Grief has its say and I regain some strength, I will tell it to leave. I will have to repeat myself multiple times before Grief finally complies. I will rehang the door and shut it gently. I will sigh in exhaustion and relief, hoping to have at least a few days of peace before Chronic Migraine summons Grief to my door again.
I narrowly avoided bursting into tears at a Thai restaurant last night. Hart and I are in San Diego with a dear friend for the American Headache Society conference. I wanted to spend time with them and (inexplicably) thought watching them eat one of my favorite cuisines wouldn’t be a problem. The wonderful smells hit me half a block from the door. I lasted long enough to snag a table while Hart and our friend ordered, then jumped up and nearly ran to get away from the reminder of how much I’m missing with these endless 
As I checked my blood sugar, my heart fell to the cold tile bathroom floor and shattered. I was doing something to bring myself delight, to distract from the frustrations of the ketogenic diet. Instead, I was blindsided by grief while watching a Dave Matthews Band video.
and avoid hypoglycemia. If it doesn’t, I really think I’m at the end of the line with the diet.