Also like the waves
Grief is like the waves.
One washes over you, and in an instant, you’re drenched, and after this happens over and over and over again, you start to wonder: “Why am I still standing here?”
The mind is frustrating. We all just want to survive and so we’re always searching for answers to “Why?”. Why. Why. Why.
We’re just like children, asking why. Parents hate this and try to shut it down, but in the end, we’re all children. We want to know. We just want everything to make sense, so that we know how to move on and survive.
But the world is too big, too complex, and too mysterious, to make sense. Answers beget more questions.
We run around the beach trying to get as far away from the waves as possible, and to a limit, we can control whether the waves reach us or not.
But the ocean is living, it itself has ebbs and flows of tide, depth, ferocity. And eventually, it reaches you, no matter what.
And because you can’t control it, because you can’t answer “Why did the ocean still reach me?”, you go to the one answer that at least answers the question, even if it doesn’t make any sense, even if it might be the wrong answer.
It’s your fault.
If you’re not careful, that answer can drown you. But like grief, if you’re willing to let it wash over you and leave you uncomfortable, it will fade away, even if it has to come over, and over, and over again.
Because guilt, is also like the waves.
There’s this feeling I can’t get away from—a series of feelings I can’t get away from. I’ve tried to make sense of them, but I can’t.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve encountered death before, or that several of my friends have lost parents now, or that everyone has experienced some form of grief. I still feel some weird sense of confusion that I can’t quite explain.
I keep searching for analogs, and I’ve only found one that helps me make sense of what I’m feeling.
Parents who’ve lost a kid.
Let me be clear. I don’t make this comparison because I think I understand what it’s like to lose a child. I make it because I’ve been grasping for something—anything—to provide some semblance of structure to these chaotic feelings spinning around and around in my head, and I have found nothing—until this.
When I read stories of parents who have lost children, I feel like they understand. When they talk about how it doesn’t matter—at all—how the child was lost and that they’re overwhelmed with the sense of “I was supposed to protect them,” I feel like they understand.
It doesn’t matter that there was nothing they could have done.
It seems like they feel guilt, even if it doesn’t make any sense—the hallmark of the craziest emotions seems to be that they make no sense.
What I get—I think—is a taste of that feeling, when I come home and see remnants of how I tried to take care of my mom everywhere. The folders, pens, post-it notes that I bought for her classes. The laptop that I bought her when her old one broke. The bobby pins I had to search for because she didn’t know what they were called and I didn’t know what they were called and we had big argument while I tried to figure out what the hell she was even describing.
The way I even drove her around or watched people pick her up to go to various events.
I tried to set my mom up to be fine without me. I was supposed to protect her. I failed. Or at least, that’s how I feel.
When I return to New York, I tell a friend that I’m beginning to think about moving back home, that even if I didn’t intentionally run away when I went to New York it now feels like it is running away, that my mom’s death doesn’t feel real here, that I need to confront my feelings head on.
“You know it’s not going to feel real anywhere,” she counters.
I bristle at this. And it’s rare, but I fight back.
“It did when I went home.”
That’s the truth of the matter. When I was home, my mom’s death did feel real.
It felt real because the house was empty, when it should never be.
It felt real because the house was cold, when my mom would have turned on the heater.
It’s all these little things—the TV not being on, all the lights off, the way the house already looks like a shell of itself as my brother and I slowly decide what we do and do not want to keep—that signal to me that life has changed.
Add to the fact that my dad is actually still here, but in another home, and the world looks downright unrecognizable.
When I go see him, it’s almost like a nice surprise, like I don’t expect him to be alive anymore because my mom is also gone. But here he is, being his usual charming-and-simultaneously-frustrating self.
It was hard the first I don’t know, one hundred times he asked me about my mom?
It’s still hard.
But sometimes when he asks me how she’s doing, it actually makes me smile. I know that’s weird, but it’s a little sign to me that my dad is a link between me, my mom, the past, and today. There’s a continuity with her, the woman she was, the woman he and I both knew.
Sometimes I feel like my mom was like a dream which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever felt because I wouldn’t be here if she was but still, when my dad talks about her, it’s like she was real.
It’s like she still is.
My New York-uncle likes to tell me, “You know, Daniel, the story isn’t over. Your father’s story isn’t over,” and I can hear his voice when I sit next to my dad and I show him photos of how everyone is doing, or when I ask him about how his day was, or when we just sit there and do nothing.
I realize my uncle is right. For how frozen in time my dad’s life feels, his story isn’t over.
He’s in a new home, one that takes better care of him than I ever could. There might not be anything glamorous about it, but it’s a new chapter, nonetheless. Life as a whole goes on, and it’s only in the stories we tell that they really end.
I go visit my dad often, which is weird breaking of expectations. I don’t stay very often, usually fewer than fifteen minutes at a time, but I still keep going.
I go because when I go, I experience a feeling that I don’t associate with my dad, but still, it’s there.
It’s happiness.
At home, I wash my clothes and hang them up in the backyard. I suddenly remember how my mom used to always try to carry the rack outside with the clothes already on them which made it very easy to trip over the concrete steps outside and I always tried to tell her to be careful.
But she was stubborn and did what she wanted and that was that.
And then I remember that maybe I should have fought her harder. Maybe if I had fought harder, the world wouldn’t look the way it does now. Maybe she would be here, if I didn’t let her go, if I didn’t leave at all.
I didn’t plan for guilt, but here it is, while I’m hanging laundry of all things. It washes over me and I tear up sticking hangars through my t-shirts and straightening my jeans.
The feelings are uncomfortable as they grip me, but I also know that they will pass.
I can hear the way she’d criticize me for not angling the rack correctly, that it’s not quite all the way in the sunlight, or whatever.
I try to recontextualize the feelings. Maybe I just miss her, and I can think of doing laundry as a happy moment—something that reminds me, that I came home in the first place to experience her silly criticism about how I hang laundry, that I got to experience that at all.
Before I go back to New York, I visit my dad one more time.
He’s sitting, as he always is, in the back of a room staring off into the distance. There’s somebody playing music—well, singing along to an instrumental backing track and occasionally plucking a note or two on his guitar—but it might as well be live music to this crowd. They’re enjoying it.
My dad is enjoying it.
My dad has always enjoyed listening to live music. It’s all the little things that show me that he’s enjoying it right now—the twitches on his face, the way I think his body moves in the tiniest of ways, the slightly wider smile he gives when I ask him, “Do you like the music?” and he says “Yes.”
The moment is short, and I don’t want it to overstay its welcome, but for a moment, I’m genuinely happy, sitting here with my dad, listening to “live” music, and just enjoying being with him.
It’s a moment of joy. I didn’t plan for it. But here it is.
And when I input the oh-so-secret door code so the alarms don’t go off as I leave my dad’s home and re-enter the rest of what we call functioning civilization, I tell myself that I will come back—that I actually want to come back—to see my dad, and maybe experience another one of these moments of joy again.
I say ‘maybe,’ because I think you can’t plan for joy the same way you don’t plan for grief, or guilt. They just show up.
You can create opportunities for them—avoid certain topics, embrace others—but all you can really do is just sit and experience them as they come and go.
When I return to New York, I decide to pack up my things. I decide that maybe (once again) that it’s not the right time for me to be in New York, and I accept the possibility that maybe it never will be but who really knows.
Life is a series of steps and you can only know the next few at any given time, and right now, I think my next steps are to go home. I want to go home. I want to create opportunities for those moments where I can sit with my dad and just enjoy being with him. I want to see how more of his story plays out.
Grief, and guilt, will come like the waves, and I mentally steel myself to face them head on.
But maybe so will joy.
Because maybe joy, is also like the waves.