Internal Clock

Specifically, the boys who seem to have an ability to know we’re nearing a meal. It doesn’t matter if the schedule has been wonky and out of the ordinary, Dexter or Gus will start begging for food within an hour of their regularly scheduled meal time. Occasionally, when past a certain time in the evening, either Gus or Amelia will go upstairs and put themselves to bed.

For animals who don’t have the ability to read a clock (unless they’ve been doing some homeschooling I’m not aware of), they seem to have an amazing ability to know what time it is.

For as much as I experience this with my pets, I was still surprised that I also have the same capacity to pay attention to an internal clock. More specifically, an internal calendar.

Last week I found myself feeling like I was in a bit of a funk, not necessarily wanting to be with people at various times toward the end of the week. I thought it was that I was on overload after being super busy for a while and then traveling and being with people almost non-stop for a few days at the start of the week. Then, over the weekend I was feeling irritable about a few things that wouldn’t otherwise make me edgy. I started to wonder what was going on with me.

Then it hit me on Sunday, as I was sitting in worship, the date was May 19th. My wedding anniversary is May 21st.

I hadn’t really been paying attention to that date – there’s a lot going on right now and I’ve mostly been focused on other dates. Also, my grief has been very sporadic. I have adjusted to the reality of my new life since Brady died which had allowed my life to expand so my grief button doesn’t get punched very often.

There have certainly been times when it has – watching the final scenes of Avengers: Endgame (those of you who’ve seen it know why, probably, in addition to thinking about how he never got to see it), thinking about the end of Game of Thrones which Brady loved and introduced me to (I started reading the first book on our honeymoon), and when a song that was meaningful to me in the early stages of my grief was used in a particularly moving part of a recent television show. In these instances and others, the pain is near the surface and the tears are present. Otherwise, the pain has been distant and there are lots of things in my life that bring me great joy.

Yet these past few days I have been reminded that while I may be focusing on other things, there are still rhythms in the calendar my body seems to know better than I do. My body has its own internal clock or calendar that feels the pain of a day when I made promises to Brady until death. The pain that those promises are now, in some ways, complete. It may just take a little extra time for my brain to catch up to what my body already knows.