Making Decisions about My Mother’s Treatment Shook the Foundations of My Sense of Wellness

by William R. Blythe, MD •

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating alongside you [and you hang on to one another, floating together so that neither of you sinks]. For a while, all you can do is float. [All you can do is keep on keeping on. All you can do is walk and not faint.]

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come farther apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function.

You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, or the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything … and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come farther apart. You can see them coming: an anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas. You can see the pain coming, and for the most part, prepare yourself. And when the wave washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out on the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars because you will have had lots of loves.”