Grief Is An Ocean
How long is 'long enough'? We speak of "getting over" loss as if grief were a mountain to be climbed once and left behind. This is perhaps the first lie we tell ourselves about grieving death - that it is a problem to be solved. Like mourning were a condition that could be cured with the right combination of therapy and time.
The grief counselors speak of "healing" as if love were a wound and the depth of our attachment, a flaw in our design. "You'll feel better," people promise, meaning well. They do not understand that healing does not mean the restoration of who you were before.
The metaphor everyone uses is drowning, and it is apt in ways they do not intend. When the ship first goes down, you are indeed surrounded by wreckage. Not just their clothes and books, but every assumption you made about tomorrow.
Everything floating around you reminds you what was, and is no more. A particular laugh. The way someone said your name. You find some piece of wreckage and hang on. Maybe it is something tangible - a photograph, a sweater that still smells like them. Maybe it is less substantial - a shared joke, a memory of Sunday morning breakfasts. Maybe it is another person, also floating, also holding on.
In the beginning, grief arrives with mechanical precision. The waves are precisely one hundred feet tall and they come every ten seconds, giving you no time to prepare or space to breathe. You learn to hold your breath for impossibly long periods and time your breathing between waves.
But you are not trying to reach the shore because there is no shore. The ocean of loss is the world you live in now, and your choice is not between drowning and dry land, but between floating and sinking. You learn to swim in grief the way fish learn to breathe in water.
Except grief isn't just an ocean. Sometimes it's a locked room. Sometimes it's white noise. The metaphors never quite work.
You learn that grief has triggers. A song on the radio. The smell of a perfume. A street intersection where you once waited together for the light to change. Your ribs feel like they're bending inward, collapsing toward nothing. Sleep becomes chaotic. Either 14 hours of nothing or lying rigid at 4 AM counting ceiling cracks. Your body doesn't understand what your mind knows. It keeps waiting for them to walk through the door.
But eventually, the waves do change. Months later - or years maybe, grief keeps its own calendar - you notice the swells are coming further apart. They are still one hundred feet tall when they hit, still capable of tumbling you through the dark water until you lose track of which way is up.
Their voice. The chipped blue mug they used every morning that you found behind the sofa three months later. The 47-second recording where they're just breathing and fumbling with their phone before hanging up.
But between the waves, you find pockets of calm where ordinary life is possible. You can make plans for next Tuesday. You can laugh at a joke without immediately feeling guilty for the lightness.
The cruelest discovery is that you begin to forget things you swore you would remember forever. Your memory, once a shrine to their presence, becomes unreliable. You realize you are not just mourning their death. You're losing them twice—once to death, again to forgetting.
This is when you understand that grief is not just about absence but about the terror of your own continuation. How dare you keep living when they could not? How dare you adapt, develop new routines, find ways to be happy in a world they will never see? The guilt of survival mingles with the guilt of recovery until you can barely distinguish between missing them and punishing yourself for learning to miss them less acutely.
Somewhere in the long middle of mourning, you split into two. There is the you that functions - pays bills, shows up to work, makes appropriate conversation at dinner parties. And there is the you that remains perpetually at sea, still learning to read the weather patterns of loss. These two selves coexist with surprising harmony. You become bilingual, fluent in both the language of the living and the dialect of the grieving.
Some days you can't. Just can't. Can't get out of bed, can't answer the phone, can't pretend this is manageable. Those days have no metaphor.
And then you're furious. At them for dying. At yourself for not calling more. At the relative who's complaining about traffic as if traffic matters. The rage has nowhere to go. You can't yell at a dead person. You can't fix what's broken. So it just sits there, occasionally erupting at people who dare to be happy in front of you.
The administrative aftermath is its own cruelty. You have to call the bank to close their account. The customer service representative says 'Have a great day!' You have to decide what to do with their phone, with the magazine that keeps arriving with their name on it. Grief should be grand and philosophical. Instead it's paperwork and checking boxes that say 'deceased'.
Eventually - and this takes longer than anyone tells you it will - you notice the waves are only eighty feet tall. Then sixty. The ocean has not become less vast, but you have become a stronger swimmer. You can see them coming now: birthdays, anniversaries, festivals. You brace yourself and let the wave roll over you, knowing you will surface on the other side.
Strangely, the waves have become your most reliable connection to what you have lost. You begin to understand that you do not want to "get over" your losses any more than you would want to get over your loves.
Love changes form when its object disappears. The people we lose continue to live in the altered geography of our hearts.
It happens on a Tuesday, maybe a Thursday. You're making coffee or answering an email, and you realize it's been four hours since you thought of them. Maybe six. Then, with creeping horror, you realize it was yesterday—an entire day went by and they didn't cross your mind.
The guilt arrives like a physical blow. What kind of person forgets their dead? But underneath the guilt is something worse: relief. Relief that you can function and that maybe you're going to survive this. The confusion of feeling both things at once, the guilt and the relief, is its own kind of grief
I said earlier that grief is an ocean. Maybe that's wrong. I don't know. Maybe grief is tinnitus. A ringing that never stops, only sometimes gets quieter than the room.
