Of surf and seasons
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I am seven years old. The surf laps over my feet, tugging gently at the velcro strap around my ankle. I breathe in salt and seaweed and that peculiar scent of sun-bleached sea life, and dig my fingernails into the springy foam board clutched against my chest. I sprint forward, scrawny knees cutting through the water until the waves overtake me. I swallow one last deep breath and throw myself to the ocean's mercy.
She is not merciful. One second I am bobbing with the sunlight along the surface, the next the world is dark and cold and I'm no longer sure which way is up. The board is ripped from my grasp and tossed aside like so much detritus. Seawater jettisons up my nostrils and I paddle frantically, fingers clawing for air or ground, sun or sand, anything, anything to orient myself.
The heedless ocean flips me, again and again, without a care, without a thought, and my lungs scream in protest — the silent kind of scream, the worst kind. I glimpse sunlight but then it's gone, and I am fighting with every ounce of resolve in my body to reach it, but I can't. I can't.
Finally, I'm slammed into the shore, my back ground hard into the gravel. The wave recedes and I gasp for oxygen. I quickly brush the sopping, sand-strewn hair out of my eyes and scramble to my hands and knees, clawing my way up the shoreline to safety, my lungs pulling audibly as I go.
Finally, my fingers and toes dig into warm, dry sand and I stand, swaying with relief. I look down, grateful for the solid ground beneath my feet, and notice the wet, sticky strap coiled around my leg. The useless boogie board trails behind me on the shore.
I look up, squinting through the sun, and my family is somehow smiling at me, completely oblivious to the turmoil I've just endured. I feel like it's been hours fighting for my life, but to them, from the outside, it was merely seconds — a pleasant dip. A familiar voice asks:
Did you have a nice swim?
+++
I think of this now — of getting utterly chewed up by the ocean — every year, when I emerge in January from my daughter's ‘season’.
It's been six years now that I have spent the fall and early winter getting swallowed up by grief's yawning maw and thrashed about with no recourse. The first couple times it took me by surprise. The intensity of it — the immense, unmanageable power — was shocking. I was certain it must get better, in time. It had to.
But the only thing that's changed over the years is that now I see it coming. And I've given up fighting it. I know now that I have no choice but to submit, and survive.
+++
It is September, our first wedding anniversary. She is still alive in my tummy, and it's the calm before the storm — or rather the dizzying, adrenaline-fuelled bliss of soaring, before you realize an endless black abyss has opened beneath you and there's nary a parachute to be found. One perfect year of marriage, capped off with a big round belly bursting with life, counting down to the day when the last and best of all our dreams would come true.
Now memories of what was once the happiest day of my life are tainted by the cloying stench of death.
It is October, and she is here, but not like we had ever anticipated, no, not at all. She is lovely, a delicious weight in our arms, perfection personified — except for one magnificent flaw: she is not breathing, her heart doesn't beat. We shatter into a million pieces.
Now when her birthday rolls around, it is a somber day but also a day filled with gratitude. It is the day that she was here, the catalyst for so much heartbreak, yes, but also so much life-changing good. Somehow, this is not the hardest day anymore.
It is autumn and the trees put on their party dresses. The year she is born, a saturated shade of goldenrod is the big trend. The leaves dance above us for weeks, the roads canopied in gold — it's so beautiful it hurts. I sob behind the wheel, trying and failing to avert my eyes from the glaring absence of her car seat in my rear view mirror. She should be looking up at this through the moonroof now. She is missing out on so. goddamn. much.
Now every golden leaf I see is added to a pile in my heart, one by one, smothering. They are beautiful, yes, but they are also so very heavy.
It is Halloween, my favorite — though it's hard to look at the child-size skeleton on my front porch and not think of her. To brush the morbid thoughts from my mind, I buy some special chocolates for the neighbor kids — big ones, handmade — and text their moms to come by. But I miss their ring at the doorbell, because I've gone to the cemetery to bring my own child a tiny, flawless pumpkin, and I end up sprawled over her grave, sobbing, for an hour longer than I intended. Oh well. It at least seems an appropriately macabre way to spend the holiday.
Now I frantically assemble a family costume each year, four different outfits tied to a theme, and we run giddy through our picturesque Northeast town snatching up sugar until we collapse. But always a ghost lingers behind us, wearing a fifth costume idea, one that only ever materializes in my head.
It is November, and the numbing shock is beginning to wear off. Everything hurts. My tears seem to issue forth from a bottomless well. Crumpled tissues litter the floor around the trash can across from my bed — I couldn't hit the side of a barn if I tried, and I certainly can't bring myself to care.
Now, when the tears bubble to the surface, I hit that garbage with effortless precision, a mucus-filled homing beacon. They say it takes 10,000 times doing something to master it; I quickly do the math — it's not impossible. I ball yet another sopping tissue in my hand and toss it in the general direction of the trash. The muscle memory kicks in and a satisfying ping reaches my ears as it finds its mark. I never even opened my eyes, didn't even bother to sit up.
It is December, and I am not in the mood. But we receive so many ornaments for her that first year that we decide to get a Christmas tree anyway, just so we have someplace to hang them. We take a video of ourselves decking the halls; it is too depressing to ever watch again.
Now, with two small kids in our home counting down the days to Santa's visit, the tree is a given, and several places of honor are reserved near the top for her trimmings. I open an unexpected brown package in the mail and my breath catches in my throat. It's a new ornament, sent just for her — we haven't gotten one in years.
It is Christmas, what should have been her first, and the only thing I'm looking forward to is handing out gifts. I select a photo of her, painstakingly retouched, and agonize over which substrate will be durable enough that kids and grandkids can someday pick it up and ask, Who is this? Everyone in the family receives a copy, so we can all remember her, together.
Now, my second daughter — 18 months old and (despite my valiant efforts against heteronormative gendered play) obsessed with the baby doll she received from her grandmother for Christmas — picks up the photo of the infant who should have been her big sister and hums ‘Rockabye Baby’ to it. Watching those chubby little fingers handle the laminate — just as durable as I'd hoped — I can't help but inventory the frame's brothers. Some are tucked into bookcases, discreetly but lovingly. Others left behind in a childhood bedroom that's used twice a year, or squirrelled away ("for safekeeping," I'm sure) in a forgotten drawer somewhere. It isn't fair and it's not even accurate, but grief is neither rational nor kind, and the thought in all its ugliness pops unbidden to my mind: I should have known. No one wants to remember but me.
It is New Year's Eve, and we are standing at a party we don't belong at, because we should be home with a sleepless infant. On the TV they chant 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 in Times Square, and the weight of all of it — of passing into a new year without my baby — bowls me over like a sparkly wrecking ball. Loved ones collapse around me and my sobs are buried in well-meaning platitudes that do absolutely nothing to ease the searing pain.
Now, I lie in bed and watch in contented silence as the clock turns over to midnight, two cherished living children asleep in my arms, and a gaping wound just as big as ever but which curiously few can still see.
+++
Did you have a nice swim?
The ocean spits me back out and I heave a sigh of relief. Another round of grief's fury, survived. Eight months to recover before it begins again anew.
Have you ever contemplated submitting to the currents of your grief? How might it change your perspective to float through rather than fight the strength of this metaphorical ocean?