Grief Explained by a ball in a box

Its been a good 18 months since I've posted to my blog... So here goes (and plz don't judge my dodgy drawings)....

I first heard grief explained via this metaphor in a uni tutorial last year, since then its kind of stuck with me, and I thought maybe it was worth sharing.

Envision in your mind that there is a box, with a big ball in it. There is also a pain button inside this box located on one of its sides. In the early stages of grief, the ball is huge, massive even! So the ball just keeps hitting the pain button over and over and over. The thing is, you have no control over it, at times it may feel inexorable and inescapable.

As the hours turn into days, and the days turn into months, the ball gets smaller. It hits the button less frequently, but when it does, it hurts just as much, It might even take you back momentarily. It's better because you can function day to day more comfortably. But the downside is that the ball can randomly hit the button when you least expect it.

Depending on what you are grieving, or even just for some people the ball may never really go away. It might hit the pain button less and less, but you have more time to recover between hits, unlike when the ball was massive, and the grief was raw.