The Tidal Force

of loss & grief

July was a hellish, hazed-out month. Wildfires choked the skies and humidity cloaked us thickly in a second, dense skin. It was so surreal, even eerie, and horribly fitting—the end of June also brought with it the unexpected and tragic death of a close family member. We were mired in the sucking swamps of grief for weeks, a blurred and weighty version of ourselves. With its stagnant smoke-clouds and hot fogged afternoons, the world seemed to echo our personal anguish.

I’d heard that when death comes it can drag the living down with it. I think I see now, how that would be. I feel as if I’m writing you from underwater, or some fuzzed-out radio frequency, or—as I’ve phrased it to close family and friends recently—some other, heavier planet. There’s not much I can say from that place, here, that would be right or good. Words don’t seem made for this. Even if they were, it is all still much too fresh to write about in a public way. And anyway, as many loved ones have already acknowledged to us, there’s nothing you can say, ultimately. Nothing makes this better. I am learning what it means to continue to live and love, given this cavernous truth.

As you might suspect, in the absence of words and in the interest of living/loving, we have been anchored to a moment-to-moment existence. This is not a shiny mindfulness gimmick, but a necessity lest we become swallowed by sorrow (although, admittedly and rightly, we do that sometimes too.) For awhile, that moment-to-moment existence looked like simply remembering to eat and shower, despite how inherently wrong it felt to do anything other than sleep and cry. In a world wracked with immediate loss, any attempt at future planning, even a day or two, felt like an insult. We yielded instead to the shifting & unpredictable tides of grief.

Eventually we made our way outside, where summer was somehow still happening. We dug our hands into the soil of our weed-snagged garden, watched fireworks, even made it to the beach for a few days. A part of my heart will always live in the Outer Banks, at the deserted stretch of dunes south of Salvo, where Mike and I stumbled upon an oasis: a secret sandbar with uncharacteristically gentle & clear, rippling turquoise waves that tossed and rolled our ragged hearts smooth as sea glass.

As you might suspect as well, in each of those moments we carried our grief. Wordlessly and wave-like, it has accompanied us at varying levels of intensity and prominence. In odd moments the wind will get knocked out of me from the sucker punch of reality. I flounder, still, in the yawning ache of so much sadness. And even as we edge back into our “regular,” familiar lives of work and chores and errands etc, we’re changed by the presence of, well, absence. Everything I see and say and touch feels tinged with extra gravity—slow, dense and viscous.

Let it be known—“readjusting” to “regular” life is wrong-feeling and insulting, too. Mostly because there is no getting used to this, and there is no returning to regular life as we knew it. Whatever sense of normal we establish now is new, and tinged with that gravity forever. I’m not entirely sure how to interact on a superficial level lately, given that fact. Finding the tricky balance of authenticity + privacy—not everyone needs, or has earned, my full emotional transparency—in a job where I see scores of people daily, including several who know our family, has been, well, hard.

But it’s all fucking hard.

Thankfully, we are not alone.

As dragged down as we have been by sorrow, we have been held and uplifted, too. Receiving the unthinking, unquestioning, rallying show of love, care and support from our network of family, friends and loved ones is one of the greater gifts in this life. We literally could not carry this loss alone, and are grateful for every word & gesture which reminded us that we don’t have to. As much as I’ve yielded to the tidal force of grief, so too have I been washed over with waves of love; both produce a feeling of powerlessness, in the cosmically necessary way.

Without throwing away all my agency—there is some, to be sure—I have found comfort lately in my smallness given the scheme of things. This has been emphasized in a book I picked up recently (not for grief support, though in hindsight I should have seen it coming, given the title: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.) I’m still knee-deep in absorbing the perspectives offered in this quasi-philosophical/quasi-self-help book, but the overarching theme that keeps getting me is how little we are in control: of our time, of what happens to us, of our lives generally. How nothing is guaranteed, so how do we manage ourselves accordingly?

As I swim through the poignant waters of a life touched by death, I find solace in yielding to these realities presented by Burkeman (there is also so much more worth discussing from that book, such as our society’s addiction to productivity; treating time as a commodity to be used rather than the fabric from which our lives are woven; and the modern trend of mindfulness as yet another covert ego-boosting tool [even though “you never had any other option but to be here now.”])

The reality that we are not in control—and that there is more to this life than strangling our to-do lists while simultaneously flagellating ourselves for being inevitably limited, flawed humans—may be a harsh one, but in the wake of a harsh couple weeks it lands for me like a balm of truth. I think I’ve made this clear by now, but I have a track record of craving control. It shows up largely as unrealistically high expectations which prevent me from taking action; as reactivity and moodiness when things don’t go my way; and in general as an insidious & anxious knee-jerk reaction in the face of my mortality which compels me to seek comfort and security as much as possible.

Death, grief and mourning have shown me otherwise. The gut-wrenching and heart-rending nature of it makes me want to revolt, resist, avoid and deny. My compulsion for control, for comfort, for homeostasis in the irrefutable face of change all rears up strong. But I can’t give in—to do so would be at the risk of dis-affirming and disrespecting in the deepest way those I love, and the life and death of someone who was dearly beloved by them. And ultimately, it would go against the nature of what is. I can hate it, wail and rail against it as much as I want, but it doesn’t change the glaring truth of our loss.

For the record (whose? yours, mine?) I am still tackling my to-do list, which includes insultingly mundane things like, “get WV health insurance finally for fuck’s sake,” and “tend to the dumpster fire that is my student loan situation,” and so on. Mike and I are still washing dishes, folding laundry, and scooping cat litter daily because two cats produce nightmare-ish quantities of piss and shit (love you, Dougie and Panch.) But I’m not consumed by these things in quite the same way. Or, they don’t provoke a frenetic brain-space preoccupied with wrapping every single thing—including my to-do list—in a neat bow.

Something more essential is tugging at the central chords of my life—some wordless, nameless, elemental force. Call it spirit, qi, energy, God, whatever; I think it has always had a finger on my pulse. Certain events shock me out of superficial distraction and into alignment with it: falling in love, massive transformation, sudden loss. It’s a shadowy, tectonic rumbling in the background, echoing true as a gong when I’m in sync and dissonant as hell when I’m not. It’s the force checking me when I’m squandering time or resources on shit that is not meant for me, or shit that simply does not matter.

This recent loss is no different. The subterranean (and also very surface-level, obvious) ripple effect(s) in our lives is(are) profound, even if we look the same. We aren’t. And where that tidal wave of grief drags us remains to be seen. For now we are driftwood, bobbing on the surface but compelled by the deep and marked, freshly and forever marked, with the dings and dents of heartbreak.