An Evolution of Grief

This bed is smaller than the one at home. Suddenly, I understand my grandparents sleeping in a full-size bed for decades. I don’t mind waking up every morning to excavate myself from under his heavy legs and veiny arms. That spot on his tan neck where the barber used a straight edge to create the perfect fade. I hesitate for a moment, wanting to press my lips against the skin and stubble and breathe in his scent.

I tiptoe out of the room, where he is still sleeping, soft white sheets against his broad shoulders. The open windows that we never shut and the fan we never turn off billow the linen curtains, a bright green baby gecko darting up the wall.

The island has been awake for hours already or never gone to sleep. Last night’s Coqui frogs and crickets seamlessly blend into the screeching of roosters and mynah birds. And always, always the ocean. Throwing itself onto the rocks endlessly. The entire island a white noise machine buzzing and calming at once.

The cottage with the small bed.

The morning dawns grey and green, the air already mild and humid, soon bitter with coffee and sweet with warming soil, waxy green leaves of plants I don’t know the names of, and orange Hibiscus flowers as big as my face. I pull on the hot pink summer dress from the day before and sneak out of the cottage, coffee cup in hand. On the road down to the bay, I meet wandering ducks and feral cats; a mangy dog stares at me, standing in the middle of the road. A goat somewhere announces the day. On the corner, Pat, shirtless and leathery, already sits in a rickety lawn chair on his driveway, guarding his racks of kayaks and boards. We lift our coffee cups and nod.

I find the small cove, sit on the flat rock someone else put just so. I imagine my heart falling into step with the waves, my breath deepening, my eyes resting on the ocean so still in the distance and so rough at my feet. I don’t see the sun because it rises behind the hillside at my back, touching the clouds on the horizon in front of me. Peach and blush, a shimmer of pink. The ocean blue and turquoise, heaving layers of white foam, trying to reach my toes with the black sand under my nails, pink polish splinters hanging on for dear life.

Kealakekua Bay at dawn.

I’m still salty and sandy from the day before, but I just sit there with my real face and my real body and my real heart and feel full, like that void, the black abyss, the endless crack right down the middle of me is filled by everything that’s growing and dying around me.

I’m touching the youngest place on earth, a mere million years old, still expanding, growing, evolving in real time. Everything can kill you here, or at least fuck you up real good. The volcanoes and riptides, the tsunamis and steep cliffs, the windy roads with zero streetlights, the sharks. And yet, everything is growing, not in a rebellious “I’ll show you” kind of way but with the urgency of a tree sapling racing toward the light, as if knowing there are no guarantees and somehow being fully accepting of this reality.

A tiny jungle grows around and inside every rusted-out car too expensive to get off the island. Hordes of feral chickens patrol the streets. Wild pigs, cats, and goats stroll through residential neighborhoods. Geckos in every house, giant venomous Hawaiian centipedes and tiny loudmouth Coqui frogs in every dark backyard. The ocean full of yellow tang and bottom feeders and tiger sharks and magnificent humpback whales. The wet green grows into oceanside mansions and dilapidated shacks, homeowners cutting out squares of roof to make room for papaya trees, picking avocados as big as a baby’s head, while watching tiny hummingbirds being swallowed whole inside the red beaks of the Heliconia flower. Every residential hillside built on black rock and overtaken by jungle, the humidity warping and darkening and softening every piece of wood, every slab of siding, every rickety chair.

It's nothing like the sharp, clear air at home, the jagged peaks, the straight angles of streets and avenues, the walkways shoveled, the fences freshly stained as per HOA rules, the houses small boxes of heat on the icy plane. There are no HOA rules here. Just warning signs about all the ways you can die.

I am content in this moment. I don’t need as much as I thought. A morning walk, a cup of coffee, my favorite thrift store dress. And the ocean at dawn.

I don’t miss the TV, email, or social media, the sugar I crave to soothe me, the distraction I seek to numb myself, the adrenaline of worry and drama, the validation of work, the mainland hustle of proving my “good-enough-ness” or “not-too-much-ness.” I feel just right.

I give up on straightening my hair, embrace the frizz. I go to the beach in a bikini so I can feel the water on as much skin as possible. I clean the gecko shit off the dishes without worrying that I’ll get salmonella.

On the plane, I’d read “The In-Between” by

Jeff Goins

, and this sentence was my biggest treasure: “Our problem, then, is not one of impatience, but entitlement.” Right after that, the pilot comes on. Sorry to inform you that we can’t land at Kona airport because there are cracks in the runway that need to be fixed. We were diverted to Honolulu, no hotel beds left on the entire island. Too many earlier flights, too many tired passengers. We scrambled to lock in an overpriced Airbnb downtown and crammed outside with all the other passengers waiting for Ubers.

My shoulders dropped as soon as I stepped into that Hawaiian air. We’d had a fight on the plane we were both too tired to continue. We shared our last protein bar, while balancing our bags on a narrow traffic island, cars rushing by us and exhausted parents carrying limp toddlers drooling over their shoulders. We laughed at the absurdity of the situation and also the absurdity of considering these problems in a world of real problems, a slew of memories and inside jokes already forming between us. He looked at me and apologized for what he’d said earlier, then pulled me in close, my cheek against the spot on his chest that feels like home.

Then we got into the wrong Uber.

Our driver, a transplant from Brooklyn, dreadlocks to his waist and wearing a top hat, blasted metal and sang along loudly. None of us realized the mistake until the driver’s actual passengers called and cussed him out. I expected a screaming match, but he just chuckled and turned around.

And that’s when I realized I rarely feel entitled to places and things being or going my way. I accept bad luck, and accidents and forces of nature and errors. But, oh, how I have felt entitled to the people around me being and acting a certain way. I would have lost my shit on the rude passenger and felt justified about it. I said as much to our driver, and he responded that it didn’t bother him at all, and I believed him.

Some people wear shirts announcing to the world that they’re “unfuckwithable” or give “zero fucks,” and, well, we all know it’s bullshit. But this guy was not phased at all.

I’ve spent years imagining relationships that had nothing to do with reality, trying to manipulate and manage and negotiate and be passive-aggressive and directly aggressive and playing the victim and punishing “bad” behavior and refusing to get off my high horse and giving unsolicited advice. I thought being patient meant waiting long enough until other people got their shit together to be the way I wanted them to be. I thought being patient meant that at the end of my long-suffering waiting period, I’d be rewarded with the outcome to which I was obviously entitled.

In the first phone conversation with my friend Emily, after I’d ghosted her for over a year, I apologized for my shit ways and she said: “I’m not entitled to your friendship.” I sat in my car at the cemetery where I wanted to walk, but it was raining, and so I just stared through the window shield at the darkening trees. How was she able to let go like that without closure, without wondering, without harassing me for the reasons, or judging me as a person, or getting stuck in some wild stories? She just kept living her life and doing her work and spending time with her other friends and being happy and sad and all the things.

I told her, “It wasn’t about you.” She just said, I know. And I thought, yeah, but HOW did you know? How did you not think there was something wrong with you? How do you have connections that don’t always result in annihilation or abandonment? And how do you stay with yourself when they do?

After that conversation, I practice. When I feel resentment or anger come up in my relationships, I look at the person and say in my head: I’m not entitled to a relationship with you. Strangely, it allows me to soften enough to loosen my grip on wanting things to be different, wanting them to be different, wanting them to treat me differently, wanting to feel differently around them, wanting them to fill that hole, that void, that empty yawning endless abyss, where you never hear the rock hit the bottom if you throw it in.

Because sugar and work and funny IG videos are pretty good, but do you know how many people I’ve thrown into the abyss of me?

I tied my unrealistic expectations around their necks and bound their feet with baggage from the wounds they didn’t inflict but were definitely responsible for tending to, shoved rage and resentment and obligation in all their pockets. I pushed them in, and they fell like stones into my abyss. Do you know how many people I’ve thrown in there, and still, they have not stacked up to reach the top of this deep crack inside of me?

The cracks in the Kona runway were there days before we tried to land. They chose not to fix them. Then the rains came, floods eroding the ground and splitting open the cracks so wide it was too dangerous for planes to land, so they had to take action.

I knew about my crack too, have always known. Thought I was the only one with a crack, damaged goods. Sometimes, I convinced myself the crack was other people’s fault, and so I threw them in, yelling, “Fix it! Fix me!” as they fell. Sometimes, I thought the crack was my fault, and so the shame made me ignore it or distract myself so I wouldn’t have to look at this ugly, deep, raggedy hole in the center of me that I didn’t know how to fix. I thought I was broken, cracked forever.

The year before, we’d come to the island for the first time. I swam in the ocean for the first time. I moved from living in theory to living in practice. Instead of standing at the shore of my own life, I got in the water. I thought I’d figured it all out. I was finally in it. But I fought the ocean the entire time. And I paid for it in scrapes from sharp rocks and burning eyes and salt in my lungs from swallowing gallons of fish pee and losing my bathing suit and getting hammered in the face by waves, because I refused to dive into this terrifying organism. As if my tiny floating head, bobbing precariously above the surface could keep me safe. It could not. But for someone who’d always talked about the ocean and wanted to live by the ocean and loved the ocean and would never fucking stop telling you about it, it was a big deal to finally get in it.

I had no idea it was only the beginning. If this had been a movie, that ocean scene would have been way too obvious foreshadowing.

That entire year I would be in the ocean of my life, getting smashed in the face by walls of salt water, coming up for air, choking, only to be pulled under again. I’m glad I didn’t know what was coming. For someone who’d lived as a head on a stick, always abstracting, conceptualizing, theorizing….experiencing life meant being overwhelmed by physical sensations and intense emotions, struggling to regulate my nervous system so I could survive.

Learning to experience my actual life rather than dissociating didn’t look pretty. It looked like crying on the bathroom floor. It looked like sleepless nights. It looked like loneliness. It looked like desperately scratching into my journals. It looked like failure after failure, toddler tantrums melting the ice queen façade and teary, snot-bubble apologies for acting like a crazy bitch and screaming during breathwork and hyperventilating during therapy and smashing things at the gym to the point the coaches asked me if I was okay.

I was not.

And yet, it was what gave me the courage to scoot on my belly to the rim of the crack and look down for the first time. There were no monsters at the bottom, just a still clear pool of crystal water. I’d thrown stuff in there to fill up the crack, yes, but also to create ripples so I wouldn’t have to see my reflection at the very bottom of that glassy pool.

Pololu Valley cliffs

Back on the island, after a year that left me wrung out, I practiced being still to look at the bottom. Except it wasn’t hard there. We went on a sweaty hike up north, down the steep cliffs of Pololu Valley to an ancient Hawaiian burial ground, a safe haven between the raging ocean and the boiling volcano. In this grove of trees, the ocean waves get caught in the air, creating a persistent mist against the jungle mountains, trees filtering the sunlight in an otherworldly glimmer. The entire forest a ghostly creature, vibrating with love and grief.

The rope protects the burial grounds.

Rob and I sat on the rocks, the breeze drying the sweat rolling down our backs, looking out at suicidal surfers. He told me how in Montana he felt like having to stiffen, brace against the elements, the cold, the ice, the wind. You have to bear down, shut down, stand down. You have to be the mountain, or you will die. On Hawaii, he felt like having to let go, relax, go with the waves and the wind, surrender to everything alive invading every space, the plants and animals in every crack, on every surface, in every home, and on our bodies. You have to be the ocean, or you will die.

I stare at him sideways, open-mouthed, because he gave words to my experience of home and of this place that feels like the home I need. I call him a fucking poet and mean it, and he gives me that sly smirk that makes me want to pull his clothes off.

Days later, I sit at the ocean alone at sunset. I watch the waves throw themselves against the sharp, black rocks, smaller versions of the volcanic mountains in the distance. The ocean doesn’t know that in decades and centuries, it will wear down the massive rock walls to tiny grains of black sand. But for now, it is splitting itself, shattering, foaming, the rocks seemingly unmoved. I wonder if I am the waves or the rocks. The ocean or the mountain. I wonder where I belong. But then I see a small pool and once I notice the first, I see many. Pools of clear water, carved into the rock and fed by the ocean.

I don’t have to decide. I can be both. I belong to both. And I don’t have the responsibility of being the ocean or the rock. I’m the pool of clear water, carved into the protective hardness of the rock, fed by the ocean, so wild and alive. And one day, the rocks will be worn down, the ocean taking them grain by grain, and all will be one.

This crack down my core, it’s not a hole at all. It’s my parts pulling away from each other, when I pretend that I’m not all the things. When I try to decide between being the ocean or the rocks. My parts are held together by my acceptance that they all exist. The petty part who doesn’t say I love you back when I’m angry. The soft part weeping over a poem a friend sent on the day my mom died six years ago. The hard part pushing for the better part of a year, five times a week, before completing my first-ever pull-up at the gym. The grieving part still sometimes wishing I’d had emotionally available parents, not addicts. The loving part, accepting they tried. The healing part, knowing I’ve become the kind of adult who would have been there for me when I was a child. The grateful part, holding my own children’s faces between my hands, carebear staring all my love into them. The humble part, repairing all the ways I’ve fucked up. The prideful part scoffing and the impatient part sighing and the silly part singing as loud as I can, off-key, knowing zero of the lyrics.

There was never anything scary at the bottom of that abyss. It was always just me, whispering, hey, I’m in here. Just look.

I spent the year between my island visits raging and talking kindly to myself. It took months until I could do it without physically cringing and rolling my eyes. I learned to feed and water myself and give myself pleasure and do new things I was scared of. I laughed at dark memes from my friend who appreciates my humor and ate with my eyes closed and cried because the sunset was too beautiful.

And when I want to be cruel and tell myself, “Wow, this is the least fucked up you’ve ever been, and that’s STILL so fucked up.” I look down at the inside of my left wrist where I had a guy with a tear tattoo ink the words “I got you” into my skin. I do sometimes feel ridiculous when I put my hand on my heart and tell myself that I’m safe and that I will not abandon myself. And even though I feel dumb doing it sometimes, I know it’s not dumber than telling myself what a worthless piece of shit I am, that I’ll never be enough, or that I’m too much, or that everyone I love will leave me or that I will be alone or that people will only stay with me for what I can do for them not who I am.

The fact that this verbal abuse leaves my body completely comfortable and relaxed, but kindness and love make me squirm allowed me to be more patient when speaking to myself in this new way. I might take another 40 years to undo the first 40.

It's okay, even brave, that the words on my wrist are aspirational.

The first time on the island, I tried to brace myself against the ocean like I braced myself against pain and the ocean showed me that resistance is futile. And yet, I continued to resist every wave of grief. I added layers of pointless suffering onto the pain of that year by fighting instead of accepting it. Why might I fight the pain? As Chanel Miller says, “pain, when examined closely, becomes clarity” and clarity usually means knowing what I need to change and I’d prefer not having to make a decision that might not work out, that I can’t blame on someone else, that is fully my responsibility to deal with the consequences.

Just give me any authority, or program, or 10 step plan, an expert, a guru to explain my feelings, to take the pain away, to make the decision, to fucking tell me what to do. At 40, I was still looking for daddies everywhere.

But this second time on the island, same ocean but different, same me but different.

I walked into the surf scared, but an elderly woman next to me smiled, and I asked casually, “So what do you do when the waves are too big?”

You dive in. Do not dive forward. Dive straight down toward the ocean floor and let the wave pull you back up on the other side.

I had no time to think, facing the first wall of water, so I followed her instructions.

I came up, slick like a seal, salt burning in my mascara-streaked eyes, full of awe. “I did it!” I yell at Rob, laughing. “I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” I have a flashback to learning how to ride my bike without training wheels, that feeling of elation and awe when I’m pedaling, free, wind on hot cheeks and sweaty hair, yelling to my neighbor, “I’m doing it! I’m doing it!”

Being the child I never got to be is the way to becoming the grown-up I want to be.

As if on cue, Rob starts yelling and pointing at Humpback whales in the distance, blowing and breaching. Is there anything more powerfully joyful than massive ocean mammals breaking the barrier between their secret world and the surface? And for a moment, I’m full of a shimmery goldenblue bliss, alive in the ocean and on this island and in this world where everything is growing and dying at once, and I feel whole in my pain and grief and the inexplicable beauty of sharing the water with enormous, misshapen, hairless ocean puppies and the poet I will always love and the version of myself who is the most naked and real and loving I’ve ever been.

Goldenblue bliss

And when I’ve had enough and run out of the water, away from the last wave trying to catch me and pull me back in, I know, dripping and glistening in the sun, that I still have no idea. That in a year from now, I’ll probably be glad I didn’t know what was coming. I have a pulling in my gut telling me that after a year of resisting, I’m ready to soften into the pain. I’m still scared, but I know it can’t be worse than what I did to myself last year, suffering miserably while trying to avoid the actual pain. I’m ready for that clarity I’ve been avoiding.

I’m practicing looking at the reality even when it’s ugly. Feeling the feelings that scare the shit out of me. Breathing when I know I’ll never feel better. Until I do. Holding myself tightly, promising never to leave myself on the floor again, committing again and again to loving myself as good and hard and gently and truthfully as I can. Telling that scared little girl to come out from her hiding place, because it’s safe now.

I dive straight down instead of resisting. Deep, deep, and deeper, right into the abyss. A dark and terrifying water grave, a moment of suspension, of wondering if I’ll ever get another breath again.

Until the wave pulls me back up and spits me out above the surface, so very, very far from where I dove in.