Spring has sprung. In all of its pollen-filled, inconsistent glory, it has arrived.  Like many others with whom I am acquainted—and most any Shackelford—my nose is keenly aware of the transition.  When I was about the age of seven my loving parents (I questioned the loving part at the time) took me to an allergist in Memphis.  I’ll spare you the gory details but let’s just say it involved a summer’s worth of trips and over 500 needles.  At the end of the torture, I was required to take allergy shots for years and now pop Benadryl twice a day.  It’s a wonder I don’t fall on my face.

Fast forward to adulthood. My father and I were both experiencing the same uncontrollable nose thing, so we found a different allergist (‘cause the other one was just for kids, and we were WAY beyond that) and set appointments 15 minutes apart.  This time it was only a morning of torture, but we responded so consistently that the doctors began betting six-packs with each other that my dad—whose test results were running about 30 minutes behind mine—would respond to the different allergens just as I had.  Amazingly enough, this man who gifted me with approximately 99.99% of my DNA reacted in exactly the same manner, without exception.  I need a sarcasm font for that.  Long story short, (too late, you say) we’re both allergic to a specific kind of oak tree.  Not enough of a problem to produce the problem we had.

That’s because, although the years of shots and constant medication had shooed away my allergies and he seemed to have outgrown his, we both suffered from vasomotor rhinitis—a fancy way of saying our noses have minds of their own. Tiny little minds that know only one thing.  If ANYTHING in the environment changes, the nose is required to malfunction.

Now if the weather goes from hot to cold, my nose runs. If the weather goes from cold to hot, I sneeze constantly.  If it’s sunny and the rain comes, my nose clogs up.  If it’s raining and the sun comes out, my nose finds some other way to misbehave.  But if the weather ever does anything consistently for an extended period of time (say, like more than a DAY), there is relief.  Granted, it’s temporary in nature, but I’ll take it and be grateful.  So will my co-workers who have to listen to me sniff and constantly clear my throat.

It finally occurred to me the other day, while I was looking for a box of Puffs (because in my humble opinion they’re SO much softer than Kleenex), that my nose is the perfect analogy for grief. I know.  You probably think that’s a stretch, but hear me out.

Anyone suffering from loss will quickly tell you there are good days and bad days and you can never tell which will be which because the change can come so quickly. All it takes is one trigger—a song on the radio, the smell when you walk into a room, a fleeting memory that darts across your consciousness and disappears—to take a day of peace and turn you into a puddle.  There is no rhyme or reason, no way to predict when the trigger will come or even what that trigger might be.  All you know is that it’s out there . . . waiting . . . and it will find you despite your best efforts to hide.  For the rest of your life, those triggers are waiting.  Fortunately for most of us, time diminishes their ability to impact us, but it never truly takes away their power.

Those of us with drippy noses know there are things we can do to at least slow down the faucet; with enough medication and tissues, we can survive the onslaught. But those who are trying to navigate through grief are not as fortunate.  Their only remedy is time—and even that will never completely take away the pain.

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