The body comes equipped with parachutes. Prepped to pop, they release of their own accord when sensing the bottom is near. I mean this almost literally. I mean this in the sense that after a good and long cry your brain is flooded with endorphins. It releases oxytocin, the same hormone experienced when being held by someone for longer than 20 seconds. Called the “bonding” or “relationship” compound. Your body makes sure you are held when you cry.
And even if you don’t cry—your brain will become under-stimulated during periods of intense grief as a defense mechanism. Your prefrontal cortex, the “thinking center,” and your anterior cingulate cortex, the emotional regulation part of your brain, are throttled down a couple notches. Neurotrophic factors and signaling molecules are released to restructure your brain—it quite literally grows around your grief—reshaping itself to live a different way, think new kinds of thoughts, feel new kinds of things.
It’s not just your brain either, the heart also heals of its own ambition. Consider the heart attack—a myocardial infarction—lack of oxygenation in some portion of the muscle making other muscles work, otherwise known as ischemia. After any ischemic attack your cardiac muscles release a molecule called SDF-1 in response to low oxygen. This compound causes stem cells to travel from your bone marrow towards your heart in order to begin repairing the damage. This is the body restructuring itself in the interest of preserving your heart.
I wish that for you when you can’t breathe. I wish that for you when you greet hurt you can’t match. But what I wish most for you is your heart staying soft. I mean this almost literally. I mean this in the way that the world has beat into my heart a softness which every day has saved me. That the small and sullied thing growing around grief starts itself anew each day and each day starts itself a little different.
Lately I find myself reaching for the body as an anchor, as the thing which ties me to this place. And this is because as a person with Schizophrenia I am often unmoored, distended across the space of myself. When my disease flairs up I compensate by stewarding the body into better places—I center its caretaking. The body can be good to us. I know enough to believe that can be true. I know enough to recognize we must in turn be good to the body.
It is impossible for me to think of the body without thinking of Emma Bolden’s collection House is an Enigma, which finds itself asking after the ways we come to love the body through chronic illness. Its final poem, “Beyond Love” wonders what would come to happen after we loved the body. The beginning goes like this:
If the saints are to be believed, if this body is a dress
we slip into, out of, if each day and night is the mantle
we tie around our shoulders, fabric thin as the time it takes
teeth to flatten the end of a thread and lead it throughan eyed needle, then what am I to make of the gorgeous
terror every star makes out of its own distance?
And what if we did believe? I think Bolden gets it right when she ends the poem:
Every morning, when I wash the wrongs I’ve made right
out of my hair, I want to believe in each drop of water
as a promise of and from the all that we’re meant to contain.
The body in its vaguest sense might simply be a container, a vessel. But in its grandest sense it too is us, all we are, encompass, can be. Bolden’s drops of water—their promise is that when they touch us we come to feel alive. Their promise is that we are washed, we are changed, we are set at home in the body.