Riding the Wild Wave: A Lesson in Grief

Many, many years ago, I experienced a profound loss. I was in a relationship that meant a great deal to me. I felt that this person felt the same way towards me. I even had the luxury of being able to discuss this relationship with my therapist who agreed, based on what I reported to her about this person’s words and deeds towards me, that, yes, he cared very deeply about me also.

This went on for a couple of years. We saw each other a few times a week, often spending the night at one another’s house. I was happy.

One weekend, I went to a medical conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. On the plane on the way down, I felt moved finally to write this man an email to unequivocally declare my love. I wrote it as a sonnet. Fourteen lines of iambic tetrameter, sometimes called the “Pushkin sonnet” since this was the form the Russian author Alexander Pushkin employed in his classic novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, with a perfect AbAbCCddEffEgg rhyme scheme. That’s the kind of precisely romantic guy I am.

My flight got in late that evening, and as soon as I got to the hotel, I went to my room, opened my laptop, got on the wi-fi, and sent him my poem. As I pressed Send, I saw, not unexpectedly, that emails were arriving in my inbox. Among the dozen or so that popped up, I noticed an email from him, this man I loved. It seemed that he had also taken the opportunity of my trip out of town to write to me.

It was not the message I would have hoped for. I haven’t read that email since that night, but I remember phrases like, “take a break,” “time to myself,” and “someone else.” I closed my laptop, looked out at the night sky, the moon reflecting off the Caribbean past the skyline of San Juan, and I went down to the bar.

I was in leadership of this medical association so I had a number of obligations in the days that followed. That seemed fine since it gave me things to do, taking care of other people’s needs while allowing me to push away whatever I might be feeling. In fact, I was holding it all together pretty well, though on the second night I pulled the Executive Director aside at a fund-raising reception to tell him I was about to lose it. He listened, put his hand on my shoulder, and we had another glass of wine.

Here I was feeling all these emotions — despair, anger, fear, grief, shame — and trying to keep a lid on all of them, just putting one foot in front of the other. But I was also feeling physically ill, like I’d been punched in the gut while my head was exploding and my legs were turning to jelly.

The third day, there was a two-hour break in the schedule. I went to my room. It was on the seventh floor and had a small balcony. I changed into my bathing suit, intending to go to the pool, and put on a bathrobe. I could feel the heat from the bright tropical sun coming though the window so I walked out onto the balcony. I gripped the railing. I savored the heat as I closed my eyes. I turned my head towards the sun as it gently caressed my face.

Then I turned my face downward and opened my eyes. I looked down at the street seven stories below. I wondered…

I don’t remember how long I stood there. An eternity in perhaps three minutes. I turned and stepped back into the room. I sat on the edge of the bed, and I called my therapist. Lucky for me, she was there, and she was able to listen and talk for about ten minutes. I began to breathe again. When we were done, I thanked her and hung up.

I was still sitting on the edge of the bed. I stared out the window at this perfect, cloudless San Juan afternoon. After a time, I pulled myself up onto the bed and lay down. I allowed my breathing to get a little deeper. I allowed myself to feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I allowed myself to pound the pillows, to kick and buck and convulse and sob and weep and keen and wail. I made sounds I could not ever remember making in my entire life. I did have enough presence of mind to shove my face into a pillow while I made these ghastly noises so that some unsuspecting person passing in the hallway would not be freaked out enough to call the front desk because it sounded like someone was being murdered in room 713.

This went on for somewhere between 30 seconds and 30 minutes. Finally, I had let is all flow though me, and when it was over, I lay there, keenly aware of my body, my heart still pounding in my chest, my lungs expanding to take in fresh air. I felt like I had just caught a huge wave while body surfing, and after being buffeted by the wild, dispassionate ocean: helpless, I had been washed up on warm, embracing shore: spent.

I lay on my side and just stared at the hotel art painting, a mountain forest of all things, to get my bearings. I could feel my heart and my breathing gradually slowing.

Finally, I sat up, gripping the side of the bed. I knew that this would not be the end — there would be so much more to feel — but I had made a beginning, and I knew that I would get through it. I stood up, slipped on my flip-flops, grabbed my key, and went down to the pool.

_______________________________________

One of my deepest beliefs about health (and for which I have no empirical evidence) is that emotions are a fluid, and like any vital bodily fluid — blood, lymph, cerebrospinal fluid, bile, urine, mucus, you get the idea, and sorry if you’re reading this at breakfast — they must be allowed to flow from one part of our body, and even our mind, to their destination for us to be healthy.

Indeed, among the principle truths of organic life is that, when the flow of these various fluids is blocked, it can result in illness and even death. Blockage of blood flow can lead to stroke or heart attack. Blockage of urine can lead to urinary tract infection. Blockage of the bile duct can lead to jaundice.

We are all, everyone on the planet, experiencing intense emotions right now, and for the most part, they are not the ones we are thrilled about. Fear, anger, sadness…

And grief. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, “That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief,” David Kessler, probably the world’s foremost expert on grief (He co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross “On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss.”), talks about what we’re all going through. His recommendations are to “find balance in the things you’re thinking… come into the present… let go of what you can’t control… [and] stock up on compassion.”

For me, his most important message is this: “There is something powerful about naming this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us. So many have told me in the past week, ‘I’m telling my coworkers I’m having a hard time,’ or ‘I cried last night.’ When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, ‘I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse.’ We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. ‘I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad.’ Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.”

_______________________________________

All of us are in positions where we are, in our own ways, taking care of others. We all need to allow ourselves time to care for ourselves. We all need to let our emotions run through us. We all need to allow ourselves to ride that wild wave and been thrown up onto that beach, for this moment, at least, safe and alive.