'I UNEXPECTEDLY HEALED MY GRIEF WITH EXERCISE'

Life coach Jennifer Hacker shares how looking after her body helped her recover from loss

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When I started CrossFit, I didn't have a sudden desire to flip tractor tyres, climb ropes or get buff. I signed up because I found myself at the end of my tether. I'd been carrying grief over the death of my infant son for 10 years, and I was losing the battle to keep pretending everything was fine.

In 2003, my three-month-old son Jackson fell asleep at our babysitter's house and never woke up. The cause of his death was sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and while internally I was all the things you'd expect - devastated, crushed, broken, hopeless - externally, I carried on the only way I knew how. I put one foot in front of the other and just kept going, even returning to work a week after he died. I focused entirely on my responsibilities. I did my job. I took care of my two subsequent children, pretty much single-handedly. I didn’t have a spare five minutes to eat, much less to grieve. I had no time for, nor much interest in, counselling, either. I'm not a talker, at least not when it comes to my feelings. As Brené Brown once said, ‘I don’t do vulnerable’.

My default was to process pain like solving a puzzle. I read books about grief, I journalled. But I couldn't fix my broken heart with ideas, knowledge or effort. No matter how hard I tried, my heart wasn't going to be less broken, not for a long time. So, I put my grief and pain in a box and slammed the lid shut. And I kept it closed.