An Ocean of Grief

Dear Rachel,

Sometimes the pain comes out of nowhere, sudden and blinding and unexpected. I can be driving home or sitting at my desk or quietly reading a book and it crashes into me like a rogue wave from which I thought I was safe, having—or so I thought—moved up the beach and away from the water’s edge. It washes over me and I recall how I’ve felt when pummeled by waves at the beach: thrown and turned over again and again, blind and frightened in the cold, roiling water. I find myself twisted all around, sputtering and gasping, spitting sand and salt, completely disoriented, with no conception of where “up” might be. A person could drown in pain like that.

You loved the sea—you loved everything about it: the sun, the water, the sand, the hot dogs and cotton candy from the Virginia Beach boardwalk. When you were an oceanography major, I used to love to hear you talk about field trips, dredging, dragging nets around the bay and coming up with different kinds of marine flora and fauna. (You, who were always afraid of strange animals and disgusted by slimy things!) I could picture you spending most of grad school on a rusty old boat, examining sediment and analyzing tides and tide pools. Perhaps you’d go to work for an oil company or a marine ecology group. (Two career paths that seemed to me to be polar opposites, yet you appeared to have no trouble simultaneously embracing both possibilities.)

Ironically, grief is like the sea and surviving it is not unlike surviving any perilous journey. Those who sail quickly learn that the sea is awesomely powerful: huge, rolling, implacable, and impersonal. It’s not malevolent, but it can kill you. It’s not really the enemy, though: On the sea, greed, stupidity, pride, and sloth are the enemies. The sea conspires to kill the unwise and the unwary. The prepared usually survive. Usually.

This is like being adrift on an ocean of pain. And I have absolutely no control over it; as the old mariners used to say, the sea is so large, and my boat is so very small.

Love,

Dad