November Grief

I woke up yesterday missing everyone who is gone.

Once when I was young, my dad took us out to a sandbar with our boogie boards. The ocean was rougher that day than usual, and even though we were strong swimmers, I was tired by the time my feet hit sand after the gap. Once there, the waves were fantastic to ride, but we had to jump off right before the sand bar cut off; otherwise we faced the battle to get back to the group through the crashing waves without the benefit of solid ground.

I took one wave too far and found myself in that middle ground where I couldn’t touch. Every time I made progress, another wave would hit and put me right back where I had started, my boogie board dragging behind me on the leash, caught in the currents. My cousins and brothers made it back each time, but I was the youngest. Then the waves started coming faster, and I could barely catch my breath between going under the crashes and popping up, much less swimming back to the sandbar. My limbs felt like noodles. Clinging to my board, I realized, “Oh. This is how people drown in rip tides.” Our parents had taught us what to do our whole lives, and so with a longing glance at the sandbar, I turned my boogie board and faced the shore. I floated, started to breathe normally again, and the ocean took me back in. Back to the sand. A worn towel from the top of the pile, a circle of aunties and my mom in the low beach chairs – talking and laughing and leaning in to share their lives. A pack of nabs and a capri sun in my lap while I sat amongst their voices and the warm sun, toes digging into wet sand.  

No one was panicked or nervous near the ocean in my childhood. We, the kids, always did our thing, and when we got too tired or wiped out or couldn’t make it back to the sandbar or floated too far down the beach, we came back.  We rested and recharged. Started in on our sandcastles. Made up games. Went back into the waves when we were ready. Or not.

I remember a few months after our baby boy died nine years ago, holding my pen above a journal and writing My grief is like an ocean. My grief wasn’t linear, as the books told us it would be. It ebbed and flowed and tides moved and it was both powerful and deep. One day might be a peaceful horizon, the next might be wave after wave, knocking me under over and over again. Barely catching my breath.

Time does heal. The pain softens. You become accustomed to the tides, per say. Still, I could feel it yesterday, and not just for Abram. This current underneath me, within me, around me. Grief and love and sadness and what ifs and sorrow all mixed into one pull. I missed everyone. Everyone we’ve lost. Our baby, Abram. My Uncle Billy. Papa, Grandma, Jean. Our pup of 15 years, Wallie. Sheaff’s grandmother, Oma. Others I have known and loved and said goodbye to.

A few days later my daughter came and laid her head on my chest in tears. She said, “Mom I thought about Abram yesterday in school. I’ve always been sad that he died, but I never thought about how Really Sad it is. He could have been a person. He could have been our brother.” She cried again, saying she just didn’t know how hard that would feel. “It’s sad sad,” she wept. She was one and half when he died, just a baby herself really.  She went on, “And then I started missing Wallie, and thinking about how we’ll never see her again or touch her fur or feel her snuggles, and it just hurt my heart. And I started crying at my desk. I couldn’t help it.”

Those waves that flip you around and knock the breath out of you.

I told her I had been missing everyone too that same day. So bad it hurt.

“You were??” she asked me, while I nodded and smoothed her wild fly-away hair.

I told her it was All Souls Day, kind of like in the movie Coco, so maybe that’s why our feelings were so so big. Maybe the veil between the worlds was just extra thin, and we could feel their spirits closer than usual, and it made us miss them even more. She nodded, and as children do, she moved on to talk about history club and Harry Potter and what she hoped to name her fish one day. I hoped it felt like the warm sun and ordinary snacks and the surrounding voices of family on the beach.

For me, the tired feeling of loss has stuck with me over these weeks, since I started writing this. An undercurrent, if you will, of grief. Sadness. I wasn’t sure why.

Then my brain caught up. Our body always remembers, even when our brain might be elsewhere. It remembers the anniversary of trauma or sorrow or loss. Every November, a heaviness pulls at my heart as it remembers the baby I carried, who kicked inside of me, who turned flips and sucked his thumb. My body always starts mourning before I do in November, reminding me. The month is beautiful – the leaves on fire, gratitude whispering through the trees and traditions, our own chaotic life in full swing.

But I am reminded.

Some days, we miss all of them.  Some days, the waves of loss just keep coming.

And some days we don’t need to fight it, as much as I want to push through and shout out the good and the silver linings and the peace, all of which I believe. Some days, the truth of life and its many sorrows is simply big, even among the wide, surrounding joy and beauty. We do not tell the ocean to stop her waves; they are a part of her. We cannot; doing so only exhausts us further. We can stop kicking against them. We can still ourselves in the moment. Float. Find our breath again. And the let the waves take us back to the warmth of the shore.