Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

Not to take away from the article, in the comments she states that her world is filled with the joy of new things with her new baby. She is doing as well as one can be for how much she loved Jake and how much she misses him.

The author is extremely talented at isolating certain feelings and making you feel them with her. I wouldn't use this article as a diagnosis of anything but her writing talent.

> She is doing as well as one can be for how much she loved Jake and how much she misses him.

Again, my point is that that statement is absolutely true and also does not preclude the notion that additional professional help may be warranted.

I went on Prozac earlier this year after a conversation with my doctor that went, roughly: “I think you’ve got anxiety” “well yeah, look at the fucking world!” “…right.” Just because there’s a good reason for what you’re going through doesn’t mean you’re not going through it.

Put another way, if the author had been shot a year ago and was saying things like “most days I’m fine, but some days I literally cannot walk or feel my left arm,” the notion that they should be talking to professionals would not be controversial, even though their symptoms are absolutely utterly explicable given what they’ve been through.

Consider that the author may elect to this suffering as a testament to her love for her partner and as a way to memorialize what he meant to her.

If your partner died and the very next day a doctor said, "Here's a pill that will make you forget you were ever together and erase 100% of the pain. You'll feel amazing." Would you take it?

Usually I would agree with your points, especially that wounds on the soul should be treated like wounds on the body - objectively, and with the best practice medical support for proper healing to minimize adverse effects.

But as she so eloquently puts it, the grief is not just a wound, its a lifestyle change. Its the repetition of existing expectations and systems that have to be retrained and rewired.

Professional help can help numb feelings but when it comes to retraining your entire life, as she also implies, professional help is only medically necessary if you are completely debilitated and unable to do the retraining yourself.

Professional help is only as helpful as it can do it better than she can. And I think because it involves lots of instances of processing her own feelings, that kind of help is difficult to provide medically.

Support groups I can understand helping her situation though.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for chemical intervention - I think a competent therapist/grief counselor can help process and metabolize the change. I also am not suggesting that the ideal goal is that the author feels no grief, rather that she is able to move in a productive and healing direction, as opposed to feeling like she's being battered beyond her control.

I would very much like for the author to be able to memorialize her partner in a way that she feels offers a testimonial to someone who was such a big part of her life. If she's able to do that right now, that's fantastic (and this post is certainly a well-rendered testimonial). The point of getting additional help (and, again, as stated above, I mean therapy, not necessarily drugs) is to ensure she can do that - to provide the support, structures, framework, and understanding that she can make those choices consciously and in a way that allows her to feel as though she's honoring his memory in the best way she can.