Grief the Size of Oceans

The container of us is rocked with fluid salt.

This morning just as the sun was coming up I listened in the half-light to the sounds of the night frogs and the dawn birds intermingling through the open window and I remembered something very old that I had buried deep inside the water that makes up my body.

I remembered going to watch the sunrise on the beach at Litchfield when I was very little and it was the last day of a trip with my mother and grandparents.

I remembered how I was consumed by grief, how I was inconsolable. And the adults said, “She’s just sad because we’re leaving.”

Looking at it now, that grief felt like a massive premonition of things to come. The grief said — “Remember every detail because this is the last time, for a very long time, that you will feel safe.”

Later, I would clutch a postcard with an image of the beach where my mother and I gathered shells as the sun rose up like church bells across the Atlantic. And five-year-old me would stare at that picture and weep.

Those who think that children aren’t filled with premonitions are fucking crazy. A child’s survival depends on reading the signs between the stars and feeling out the road ahead to see if they need to gather provisions.

As we left the beach that morning, the last time my grandparents and mother would be in a car together, the last time I would really be present with my mother until I was an adult, I lay in the back seat and cried until I became physically sick.

“She misses the ocean,” they said as they cleaned me up. “She must have really loved it there.”

And that was the first time I noticed that human inference is clouded by fear, like refusing to speak a truth about a thing provides a measure of protection. We are superstitionists masquerading as scientists.

From that point on, I became terrified of becoming physically sick, as if vulnerability was the flour that baked loss and if I was very careful to omit that ingredient, I’d never have to taste the finished product.

Sometimes I just refused to eat.

So as I listened to the waves crashing against the cliffs all day in Hawaii as I sat at a safe distance on a lush jungle-shrouded porch, I kept asking myself, “Why don’t you just walk down and see her?”

And the answer that came back was — “You’ll go when your bones say you are ready.”

On the dark drive the night before on the Red Road that hugged the cliffs, I stuck my arm out of the Jeep window and gestured toward the black sense of the sea’s movements and I said, “There is something so huge out there, I can feel it.”

The morning my mother walked away from our lives, I stood at the door of our house and watched her form recede down the road like a wave I was powerless to catch. I took the postcard of the beach and tucked it into a book. And from that moment, words and horses saved me. Words, for their descriptions of feelings that have no voice, and horses for their oceans of power that, for a landlocked girl, contained a remedy.

It’s not a fluke that horses and oceans tally equally in our myths.

So when my bones told me to take a walk yesterday, I was oddly self-conscious as I followed the quiet road toward the sound of the waves crashing.

I stood close to the edge of the cliffs and I looked out to the right and to the left and to the stretch of water in front of me and, as I later laughed when I told Christopher, “The description of the house forgot to say we were staying beside the entirety of the Pacific Ocean.”

I sat on the grass and watched the water crash up against the rocks as someone who finally understood that it would have taken an ocean to hold the loss of my mother for me.

I thank the natural world, the water, the horses, for holding the echo of that loss, for mothering me until I was old enough to mother myself. This process can take decades when it’s grief the size of an ocean. I’m raising my hand here — I’ve spent almost five decades longing to feel safe.

And the way our genes hold that water memory in our prescient young cells is the snapshot of how intergenerational trauma works. At five years old, I wasn’t just holding my own losses, I was holding the sadness of my mother, my grandmother, and their mothers before them.

The container of us is rocked with fluid salt.

Until I was ready to feel that trapped flow inside of me through a direct sense of my own body and its connection to the living world, the horses stood in as proxies. I watch them do the same for others every day at the farm. And I thank them. They’ve carried our burdens for millennia.

We are a part of the systems and cycles of nature. And we have become so disconnected from our source that the grief we feel isn’t just for our personal losses, but for our intrinsic separation from the systems that were designed to support us.

Hawaii doesn’t feel like it’s forgotten this. The energy here is so gentle as it helps you to remember your way back. Maybe that’s why so many of us are drawn here.

The sea and the horses speak the same language. I thank them for holding me close as I re-learn the alphabet. I’m okay with being a superstitionist disguised as a scientist when the waters of remembering will eventually bring me home