11/15/2025
There’s so much truth to this.
Sometimes, when I talk about the physical symptoms of grief, I think people don’t believe me.
THE LYMPHATIC SYSTEM OF A GRIEVER — Post 1/30🌿
“When Grief Sits in the Body”
A healing series by Lymphatica
Tonight, I am not writing as a therapist.
Not as a practitioner.
Not as someone who teaches healing for a living.
Tonight, I am writing as a daughter.
A daughter who lost her mother.
A daughter who has carried a grief so heavy that her body could no longer hold its own weight.
Because there is a truth I cannot keep silent anymore:
My grief did not stay in my heart — it broke into my body.
And if you have ever lost someone you love, maybe your body knows this truth too.
🌿 When Grief Lives Inside the Body Before It Finds Words
There is a silence after losing someone that does not feel peaceful.
It feels like a collapse.
A drowning.
A falling into yourself with no way to stop the descent.
When my mother died, the world kept spinning as if nothing happened…
but inside my body, something shattered.
Before I even knew how to speak my pain, my lymphatic system was already speaking it for me:
My lymph nodes swelled.
My underarms became puffy.
My chest tightened.
My gut twisted.
My exhaustion became bone-deep.
I felt as if my whole body was carrying a sadness that had nowhere to go.
Only later did I understand:
Grief is not only emotional.
Grief is physical.
Grief is cellular.
Grief is lymphatic.
🌿 Why Grief Slows the Lymphatic System — The Science of Missing Someone
When the heart breaks, the body goes into a kind of survival that does not feel like survival at all.
1️⃣ Breathing becomes shallow.
Your vagus nerve tightens.
Your diaphragm locks.
Your neck and chest stiffen.
And these are the very places where major lymph pathways live.
When they tighten, they close.
2️⃣ The immune system becomes overloaded.
Cortisol rises.
Inflammation simmers quietly.
The lymph thickens.
Everything becomes heavy.
3️⃣ The nervous system freezes.
Not because you don’t feel —
but because feeling becomes unbearable.
The fascia traps emotion.
The lymph tries to carry memories, longing, pain…
and eventually collapses under the weight.
Your body mourns right alongside your heart.
🌿 The Part I’ve Never Said Publicly… Until Now
This is the hardest part to admit.
But I believe — with every cell in me —
that the grief I carried after losing my mother did not just hurt me emotionally.
It changed my body.
It changed my health.
It changed the trajectory of my life.
I cannot make medical claims.
But I can speak my truth:
I believe my grief contributed to the illness that followed—
to my thyroid cancer…
to the years of fear and uncertainty…
and eventually to the brain surgery that changed everything.
My body was not just “sick.”
My body was broken by longing.
Broken by trauma.
Broken by a sadness too large for the lymphatic system to carry alone.
I look back now and see it clearly:
The grief was too heavy.
And my body broke trying to hold it.
🌿 Grief Made Me a Patient Before I Was a Healer
There were months where I helped people heal while I was falling apart.
Where I drained lymph while my own lymphatic system was drowning in fatigue.
Where I taught breathing while I felt suffocated.
Where I stood strong for others while collapsing silently inside.
I have never felt more human.
More vulnerable.
More aware that even healers need healing.
Sometimes I still reach for my mother in small, automatic ways—
in victories, in moments of fear, in the quiet hours of the night.
And every time, a part of me aches:
“Mom, are you seeing what I am becoming?”
“Would you be proud of the woman I am today?”
This longing…
this unspoken conversation…
this ache that never fully disappears…
It sits in the lymph.
It sits in the tissues.
It sits in the breath.
🌿 Why This Series Matters
Because grief is not a moment —
it is a biology.
A chemistry.
A physical shift in the way your body survives.
If you have ever wondered:
“Why am I so swollen?”
“Why am I always tired?”
“Why does my chest feel tight?”
“Why does my body hurt more since I lost them?”
I want you to hear me:
💚 You are not imagining it.
💚 You are not weak.
💚 Your lymphatic system is grieving with you.
💚 Your body is trying to carry the love you lost.
And your body is allowed to mourn.
This series will help you understand
why grief affects your lymph,
why your symptoms feel heavier,
and how to gently guide your body back into safety —
not through force, but through tenderness.
🌿 **Tonight, I honour my mother…
and the body that survived losing her.**
And if you have ever lost someone —
no matter how long ago —
I want to whisper this:
Your lymph remembers them because your love was real.
Your body aches because the bond was deep.
But your body can heal, slowly, softly, beautifully.
And you do not have to walk this journey alone.
I am walking it with you.
With grace, gentleness, faith, and understanding.
Bianca 🤍
Lymphatica 🌿
