Grief and the Ocean

Hello to those who are following along on this traveling journey of grief. I am on a new adventure this month, taking a few days for a solo trip to Morris Island in Cape Cod. The entire island is a nature preserve filled with birds, sea shells, and mystery. The Nantucket Sound borders one side of the peninsula and when the tide is out you can walk over sand that is normally ocean bed!

The ocean always calls me back, it has since I moved away from her in 2010. The great expanse and power of her is not something your body soon forgets after being near. When I was packing up to leave Tuesday morning I could smell the salt air all the way in Troy, the sharp tang of seaweed and the thick air that lays on your skin- sang to me to come home. This is my 1st venture down to Cape Cod and it has been a home coming in more than once sense for me. I don’t talk very much about my heritage because it has made me uncomfortable for a long time, given the change I want to make in this life, but my ancestor’s are traced all the way back to the Mayflower. It has made my heart hurt knowing my veins carry the actions that laid the foundation for what I so badly want to change now. Something clicked inside me though, from the moment I arrived, my bones remembered this place. It is a profound experience to stand in a place that several hundred years ago, the people who needed to exist for me to be here stood on the same beaches. I have roamed the shoreline trying to digest what all this means and what does continued healing look like from here. I had the glorious thought of what if I am a bridge, what if my job is hold my ancestral history in one hand and an open hand for the future of change in the other-a conduit so to say? How can I ever hope to heal the now when I am not doing the work of understanding where I came from? Is this part of my path of ancestral healing? I have never doubted the saying that we must learn from the past so that we don’t make the same mistakes, I think the time has come that I apply that to my lineage. I don’t know where this will lead me, but any kind of internal reconciliation that helps me be a better person I welcome.

Yesterday was a day filled with metaphor offered to me by the sea. As I mentioned when the tide is out there is a great expanse to behold that is normally only experienced by sea creatures, so I wasted no time squishing my toes in the soft mushy bed! I saw hermit crabs in their natural environment, birds of all kinds, decomposing trees, and little fishies. I got some pictures of all the different bird tracks and was struck by how it is the perfect message of how ephemeral it all is. Within a few hours the tide would be in, erasing the proof that both the birds and I were there. I tootled onwards. After a long morning walk I settled in for some reading. I ordered David Whyte’s Everything is Waiting for You book of poetry before I left, having the sense that it was meant for me to read at the ocean, as I began the section called Thresholds, I quickly realized it was about processing his mother’s death. My instincts had been correct. So I sat in my chair with tears streaming down my face, reading my grief back to myself. I will include the two poems that struck the deepest here:

The Shell, by David Whyte

An open sandy shell on the beach empty but beautiful like a memory of a protected previous self. The most difficult griefs ones in which we slowly open to a larger sea, a grander sweep that washes all our elements apart.

So strange the way we are larger in grief than we imagined we deserved or could claim and when loss floods into us like the long darkness it is and the old nurtured hope is drowned again even stranger then at the edge of the sea to feel the hand of the wind laid on our shoulder reminding us how death grants a fierce and fallen freedom away from the prison of a constant and continued presence, how in the end those who have left us might no longer need us with all our tears and our much needed measures of loss and that their own death is as personal and private as that life of theirs which you never really knew, and another disturbing thing, that exultation is possible without them.

And they for themselves in fact are glad to have let go of all the stasis and the enclosure and the need for them to live like some prisoner that you only wanted to remain incurious and happy in your love never looking for the key never wanting to turn the lock and walk away like the wind unneedful of you, ungovernable, unnamable, free.

from Everything is Waiting for You

FAREWELL LETTER

(For All the Mothers Who Have Passed Away)

She wrote me a letter

after her death

and I remember

a kind of happy light

falling on the envelope

as I sat by the rose tree

on her old bench

at the back door,

so surprised by its arrival

wondering what she would say,

looking up before I could open it

and laughing to myself

in silent expectation.

Dear son, it is time

for me to leave you.

I am afraid that the words

you are used to hearing

are no longer mine to give,

they are gone and mingled

back in the world

where it is no longer

in my power

to be their first

original author

not their last loving bearer.

You can hear

motherly

words of affection now

only from your own mouth

and only

when you speak them

to those

who stand

motherless

before you.

As for me I must forsake

adulthood

and be bound gladly

to a new childhood.

You must understand

this apprenticeship

demands of me

an elemental innocence

from everything

I ever held in my hands.

I know your generous soul

is well able to let me go

you will in the end

be happy to know

my God was true

and I find myself

after loving you all so long,

in the wide,

infinite mercy

of being mothered myself.

P.S. All your intuitions were true.

The wind was blowing hard while I was sitting there and I had the unusual experience of having my tears falling sideways, and then instantly drying. It gave my face the feeling I had been swimming in the waves- it was too cold for that-when I then thought how interesting it is that our tears are so salty. If this wasn’t a full circle moment I don’t know what is, sitting by the sea crying salt water back into her source. Or is it we carry the immensity of the ocean inside of us and when we have big feelings the ocean releases through our eyes?

So, at sunset I took Mommy down for her next promised adventure, the sky was marvelously dramatic. She loved the ocean so much. I am in a different place than when I wrote last, I have moved beyond successfully existing and am in an undefined plain right now. I still cry some almost every day, but I feel other things now too. I have one final metaphor offering from the ocean yesterday, when I look out at the Nantucket Sound at high tide, it is impossible to see where sea bed will be exposed in a few hours, yet it will. Right now I am in a high tide phase, things are getting washed up on my shores and I have no clue what it will look like when I see low tide. But, that is ok, because I know low tide will come back as it always does and I will travel down the next sandy path I am meant for. I dare say what I feel, is a shadow of hope remembering this. So for now I will be all big waves, frothy sea foam, and a huge unknown.

So, for now I will leave you my loves, the sun is out and there are shells to find. Until next time-may we all embrace the pull of the moon ❤ L.

This book was on my bedside table in my Air BnB room. I knew that it was marked to the page I needed before I even opened it.

The page it was marked at…