Diary of Grief

Notes from Week Three: 8/8 - 8/14

I visited my therapist this week, a woman who has suffered more losses than many. She speaks of grief as an ocean wave. When you’re at the beach, she says, observe the pattern of the waves. I get her meaning. Grief seems to pull back a little, at times, giving relief, then breaks on the shore of your soul again, without mercy, when you least expect it.

A few days later, C and I are strolling barefooted along Pismo Beach, the children running in three separate directions across the vast expanse of sand. I have the peculiar sense that I am looking at the sky for the first time; it feels boundless and encompassing at the same time; so blue, so wide and so good. My breathing is easier in the salty air. And my heart feels freer, lighter, lifted somehow. Riding a gentle crest of the wave, perhaps.

On the beach, thoughts of Steve surface readily, since my fondest memories come from the beach house our families rented together all those summers. A memory plays: Steve and I are tanning on the beach, his skateboard propped in the sand near his head, the boom box playing George Michael. Another: Steve gliding flawlessly across the ocean shores on his skim board. The memories don’t gnaw too deeply, but instead seem to nibble at the edges of me, leaving me pensive as I walk the shores alone for a while, watching determined pelicans swoop down across the ocean’s surface, looking to satisfy a compelling hunger.

The next morning, at the hotel’s continental breakfast bar, a preteen, skater kid helps my six year old with his too-heavy tray; and for a second, the kid is Steve. It’s him twenty-four years ago, back in our skater days – his skater bangs, his skater Vans. There, at the table, with the bagels and Cocoa Puffs, I slip into a whirlpool of sadness. And it hurts all over again. The loss cuts across my heart at sharp, acute, angles.

Then: wild sobbing.

Just like that the wave has come. The wave has come, and crashed hard.

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Later, after a trip into town for clam chowder, C takes the boys to the game deck, giving me some alone time with my laptop. At the desk in the hotel room, I write this poem:

Seeing

Sometimes, when

someone dies, you

start seeing them

everywhere—

their face suddenly

in every crowd.

You are

in a crab shack,

in Pismo;

he’s in line

in front of you –

his profile,

his hair.

And for

a split

of a split second,

you’re in a world

where this is possible;

where he isn’t gone;

where it’s all been

a universe of dream.

You’re in a world

where you can

touch him

on the shoulder,

where you can

embrace him

the way

you’ve so

desperately

been needing

to do.