Grief is an Ocean

Today, April 26, 2017, is the first anniversary of my Grandma’s death. It’s the first anniversary of death that I’ve experienced.
Her death has profoundly impacted me. I want to qualify that statement by saying that the impact has been in unexpected ways, but I don’t know that I could name one way that was expected, especially when it comes to the grief I’ve experienced in the last year.
Grief has sharpened my emotions. Feelings are stronger, more intense and sudden, and able to pierce further into me than before. It has created an opposing dimension of my being, a more full spectrum of emotion than I had previously known. In some ways, it has made me feel more vulnerable, more human, and in other ways, it has made me feel more dull, and less human than before.
Grief has made me question everything, caused me to seek focus for my life, and has made me more aware of life’s constraints.
Grief is an ocean.
Once I take that first step into the water, there is no return to shore. In this ocean, my existence remains. Most days the tide is low, the water shallow, and the waves calm. Other days, the tide comes pouring in, causing the water to rise and the waves to intensify and crash over me. The current swirls — I swirl along with it—and it takes me, sometimes kicking and screaming, other times without resistance, to a new part of the ocean I’ve never before visited. No matter how intense the storm, the ocean always returns to calm, stable, gently swaying back and forth.
New grief, and there’s always new grief, causes a ripple that can remain just a ripple, or swell into another storm that brings everything cascading back.
But the ocean always returns to its state of calm, stability, gently swaying back and forth, the new normal.
