I'm enjoying February sun on my skin cooled by the breeze, probably tricking me into another layer of sunburn. Reading words about leaving with the background of crashing waves, the soundtrack of the place I have left to. I read an "I love you" text from a friend, and I feel her love and care and it brings tears where there's been none.
It sinks in that all that's left now is life and grief.
No more services to honor Dad or current plans for trips. Just Mom's slow dementia progression and debt to keep digging ourselves out of (a reminder of the other big stressors of our life lately), an ongoing struggle to find our community in it all, and the reality of Dad's absence equally relieving and sad as contradictory as the waves themselves.
I'm fascinated by the riptide as I walk out the tears, the vertical flow of ocean where everything else is horizontal. Beautiful swirls of water left in its wake, the kind that can be dangerous if it wasn't so shallow or you didn't know it was there.
I've heard people say grief is like waves, but the dissociating that helped me cope the last 4 years of my parents' health crises numbs that for me. Currently grief feels more like a gentle wake, a soft parting of water left behind a slow-moving boat. I should be content with that–how lucky for me that I can call grief soft at this moment–but the boat in the metaphor was watching my Dad's wasting body, decaying even before his final breath.
It’s unsettling the ways this grief “should” be leaving giant crashing waves, and may still when the spell of numbing breaks. I feel that darkness too, lurking under the gentle surface.
There is no avoiding, no manipulating this all to be what I want or think it should be. Just, in the now posthumous words of James Van Der Beek: Allow, allow, allow.
Like ocean waves, emotions come and go.
Stress rises and lowers.
Breath enters and leaves our body.
Life (and grief) ebbs and flows.
In.
And out.
This too shall pass.
And return and pass again.
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Might start posting more of my "shitty first drafts" (in the words of Anne Lamott). After losing years of these ramblings when Meta deleted my accounts in November, I'm thinking about where I want my words to land.