Grief comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float.
You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet high and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 foot high, but they come further apart. When they come they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…. and the waves come crashing. But in between the waves there is life.
Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet high or 50 feet high, and while they still come they come further apart, you can see them coming.
An anniversary, birthday, Christmas, you can see it coming for the most part and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, spluttering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.
The waves never stop coming and somehow you really don’t want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them too.
Thanks for sharing that. It really is how life is at the moment for me and lots of folk on this site.
Today I am being battered by those waves as I have been all week, and so is my 16 year old daughter who is so sad and exhausted and missing her wonderful dad.
We are clinging on together today and helping each other float to survive another day.
Sending love and strength to all xx
This is written so well. So lovingly and exactly how it feels as you travel this road you didn’t want to travel.
Some days the waves are calm with light splashes that touch your soul. . On others they are like a tsunami.
Those tsunami days are so hard aren’t they.
This week has been one every day for me - am hoping for less stormy weekend as I am exhausted xxxx
So well put the waves are really battering at the moment, so much so i feel likebi am drowning. It isnt 2 weeks yet since i lost the love of my life my husband Graham. I dont know how much longer i can hold on for. My family have been no support whatsoever. Xxx