I couldn't sleep last night, and picked up one of the many books now in our "grief library". We've had countless people give us books on grief, and some we have bought on our own. This is the first in a series sent to me by my church. I happened to turn to a chapter that talks about shock, and how this is why some people seem so calm and composed at funerals. That the shock serves as an emotional anesthetic during a time of unimaginable pain. One mother in the book describes that she found herself comforting other people at her son's funeral. She explains, "It was almost as if the funeral was for someone else's son, not my own."

This is such an interesting concept to me, I guess because I didn't know much about the whole grief process before. It's like our bodies kick into survival mode. We are in shock, so we detach ourselves.

My parents and I were a thousand miles away at the funeral. We stood downstairs in the fellowship hall and greeted more than 800 people that came to the funeral (According to the paper). Ask me if I remember a single one of them.

I don't remember crying much at the service. I think I shed most of my tears that day trying to somehow drag myself out of the house to go. Mom and Dad seemed relatively calm too.

Again, I asked my Aunt Claire if this was "normal", because it didn't feel normal. We couldn't be any more devasted over Evan's death. But she said when Bob died, she had many days like that. You just cry until you can't cry anymore. It's impossible to feel all the pain at once, so you feel it in waves. It's a process. She said she was thankful for the days she could be numb.

Those first few weeks, it was like an out of body experience. It's like everything is moving, yet perfectly still. Everything is a blur. It is the most unnatural thing I have ever experienced.