During the pandemic I saw a Facebook post showing a sign at a theme park in Japan that read: “Please scream inside your heart.” At first glance it looked like a bad translation of the request, “Please don’t scream out loud when you get scared on this ride.” At the time I saw this I was a 24/7 caregiver for my husband whose Parkinson’s Disease suddenly seemed to be on an increasingly rapid, downhill spiral. And, while feeling that I had been working on “screaming inside my heart” because of this, it occurred to me that this obscure little phrase also had profound meaning for the unprecedented times in which we found ourselves living when the pandemic entered our lives. 

Perhaps you, too, have experienced this “silent scream.” Thinking back over my lifetime, I can remember a time or two when I was so scared that even though every inch of my body said, “Scream!”, I found myself incapable of uttering a sound. Truth be known, many of us have probably had moments when we’ve experienced this “silent scream phenomenon.” Life as a care giver had already unceremoniously tossed old routines out the window, replacing them with complicated regimes of endless therapies, doctor appointments, pill schedules, fatigue, and burnout. Then, just as I had begun to adjust to “care giver normal,” along came COVID. Once again life’s routines were altered, replaced by social distancing, sheltering in place, and isolation from family and friends. While this unwelcome incursion of the pandemic into life added to the complexity of being a caregiver, Brian’s death a year later became my own private pandemic. It felt for all the world like the rug had been pulled out from under me again, throwing me to the floor, wondering how I would ever get up.

Thinking back, it seems to me that, surrounded by fatigue, doubt, and grief over so much of life that seemed lost, the silent scream had begun to creep into my body, slowly rising to a deafening roar and taking up residency inside my heart on the day that Brian died. Every day since, its constant drone has been the background noise in my life, reminding me, and me alone, of how much I lost. How alone I was.

Grief is like that, I've learned. It’s a scream that broke my heart, but that I wasn’t going to let break my resolve. Eventually I learned to pause. To close my eyes. And to just simply breathe. Now, two and a half years after Brian’s death, this silent scream has taken on an entirely new meaning for me. While its cacophony is somewhat quieted by the passage of time, I know it will still, in some small way, always be with me. But learning to live with it has brought me to the realization that I still have life that needs to be lived. So, even though I know that scream will still rise to the surface sometimes, I am learning to live with it. And on those days that I hear it a little too loudly, I’ll keep telling myself, “You’ve got this!” And life, and I, will go on.


                             And this silence
                             without you
                             is like a scream
                             only my heart
                             can hear.

                             Edward Lee