LOST AT SEA

When my daughter Monique died, I was beside myself; literally “beside myself”- in shock, somehow floating alongside my body, out of whack with everything, in a dream-like state of numb agony.  I forgot to eat and drink.  Time sagged and slowed for me, but the outside world continued to spin like a happy carousel, as though nothing had happened.  Alarm bells were ringing in my head.  I was heading out to sea in a panic to save someone who had already slipped beneath the waves.  The awful sense of helplessness and futility were exhausting, and I realized early on that I was drifting in unknown waters, with no clear sense of what to do and where to go.  I was lost.    

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Ironically, one of my favorite memories of my daughter is playing

Lost at Sea, a word game she invented to pass time on car trips. 

She would start with a word, such as “car” and I would say, “Lincoln.” 

She’d say “President”.  I’d say “Bush”, She’d say “tree”, etc.  

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Eventually, we would run out of connections and be sufficiently “lost.” 

The challenge was to find our way back to “shore”, i.e. the word “car”

without repeating any of the words that charted our original course

“out to sea.”       

It was a surreal experience to plan a funeral. I was determined not to allow my daughter’s illness to define her.  I wanted the people attending her funeral to know the full range of her life and those things that made her unique and precious.  I wanted to please her somehow, and to honor her wishes to the degree I knew them.  It was also important and personally healing that all her dear friends and siblings played a part in honoring her memory.    

Human kindness took on an angelic aura and it taught me that all the little things people do at a time like this really do matter: the help with guests and housework, the food, the planning, the cards, the calls, the stories, the listening, the attendance, the hugs, and the steady gathering of ordinary people with extraordinary compassion.         

One of the odd things I experienced early on was an excess of energy that gave a manic edge to everything.  It was helpful when someone who had survived a physical assault told me of their own similar feelings of relief and euphoria in the days that followed their crisis.  I can now embrace the experience with marvel that our brains have the capacity to uplift us with a chemical surge of endorphins when we are under great stress and pain. 

On the other end of the spectrum, much of the time I’ve felt numb.  In a journal entry I wrote:  “My heart and my head are heavy as lead.  It feels like they’ve been novocained”.  At these times I have often envied those who cry easily, and openly exhibit the profound pain that testifies to profound loss.  “What’s wrong with me?” I would ask.  “Where is my heart?”  I once had someone look me in the eye and say scoldingly “you’re not grieving her.”  Self doubt would weigh me down, and make me question whether I was doing things correctly.  What I remembered, fortunately, is that sometimes when we are deluged with feelings, and overwhelmed, we can in fact feel very little -  or nothing at all.  

Months went by and then, one day in a restaurant, out of the blue, came a wave of emotion so powerful I thought it might literally crack my chest in two as I wept at the table.  It reminded me of the stories people tell of feeling broadsided by their grief in the middle of the grocery store. This journey of grief can be a sloppy and bewildering process.

The other night I had a dream:

I was seated in an empty theatre and suddenly, my daughter was there, sitting beside me.  “Hi,” she said and smiled. We pressed our foreheads together and cried. After some time she said, “OK, Dad, listen!  It’s like Lost at Sea; you have to find your way back to shore, but you can’t get there the same way you got here.  You have to find a new way.  Take your time.  Ride the waves.  Trust.  Feel.  You’re creative, Dad.  You can do it.” 

And then she was gone.   

The guiding lights and signs are everywhere.  Something I read.

Something I look up and see.  Something I feel.  Something I dream. 

My “port” may be destroyed, but there is always a shoreline;

a place where mystery laps up against the things I know as real;

a place of possibility.

Now, a year from that fateful day my daughter died,

I no longer describe myself as desperate and free floating. 

Although I ride the waves of grief practically every day,

the swells of emotion are not as large and overwhelming,

and the waves are fewer and farther between.  

To all of us destined to travel this path I’d suggest that

if nature is full of surprises, then so are we. 

We’re creative. 

We can do this.

We’re finding our way.                                                                                             

- wmh / community hospice 2008