Grief Tsunami

Photo credit: Hans Isaacson, unsplash

Grief floods in sometimes

Turbulent, like angry swells

In a stormy sea

I was seventeen when my mom shared the news of her first cancer diagnosis. A nickel sized tumor in her right lung. It wasn’t bronchitis after all.

I got blackout drunk that night and woke up in a mud puddle outside the pizzeria in the sleepy New Jersey town where I lived with my younger brothers, dad and step mom.

The buzzing hum of the street lights overhead accompanied me as I stumbled clumsily down the deserted Main Street to find my dad who was already lowering bagels into the steaming cauldron of boiling water in his bakery at 3am.

We cried together and then he drove me home.

On an early August morning not quite two years later, I was nineteen and about to begin my sophomore year in college. I was living at home with mom again, and I had just come home after an all nighter helping my boyfriend put the finishing touches on his final presentation for his completion of culinary school.

My mom was in her bed reading The Philadelphia Inquirer. We snuggled and chatted for a bit before I climbed the narrow staircase to nap in my bedroom on the third floor of the jangedy Mt. Airy row house we were renting.

The telephone rang just a few minutes later. Mom and I each picked up at the same time from our respective bedrooms. It was my best friend calling. She and I quickly recognized something was off in my mom’s speech. Her words were garbled and she said something that sounded like, “I’m scarelled.”

I told Shawnna I would call her back, and I immediately went back downstairs and found my mom sitting upright on the edge of her bed. Her spine was stiff and she looked scared and confused. Before either of us knew what was happening she was in the grips of what we’d learn later was a gran mal seizure.

I can still see and feel all the sensations, the adrenaline, that coursed through my veins in the moments that followed.

A primal scream from a depth I didn’t know existed thundered up and through and out of my small body and I remember feeling as if time simultaneously slowed and quickened and I couldn’t breathe.

Shockwaves of panic ping ponged inside my head as I tried to stay present so I could comprehend what was happening throughout the ambulance ride and the more than twelve hours waiting for answers, mostly alone, in two different hospitals before learning that there were three inoperable tumors in her brain.

The doctor said she would have two to six months to live.

Two years and nine months later my dad arrived from Maine to say his goodbyes. They had been divorced for twelve years already. He sat on her bed and they held hands. She smiled sweetly and said, “daddy’s home,” and then she slipped quietly into a coma.

Three days later, on an overcast Tuesday afternoon, my brothers and I, along with mom’s two closest friends, sat with her and took turns holding her hands, eyes fixed on her still, quiet body letting her know we would be ok and that she could let go.

As soon as she breathed her last breath the sun broke through the clouds and we all let our shoulders drop away from our ears.

Every day between that horrific August day and the gray May afternoon when her soul slipped softly from her body felt like an eternity of held breath and swallowed tears and trying my best to wake from this nightmare that wasn’t a dream.

"Who will I be without her and how will I survive?” flitted across my mind’s eye like an advertisement on the ribbons that trailed from the tail of those loud, low flying planes that roared across the sky at the crowded Jersey shore in the summertime.

So much about that time felt surreal as I did my best to live in the charade where everything was just supposed to be normal.

It was as if the earth had stopped spinning on its axis and nothing would ever again make any sense.

I have a recurring dream where I’m stuck inside a glass house on an island as a tsunami swirls viciously outside, gnashing it’s gnarly teeth and threatening to swallow me whole like the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are declaring ferociously, “I’ll eat you up, I love you so…”

The same feeling of powerlessness consumes me before I wake up and return to the here and now remembering that I am safe and held.

Grief still floods in sometimes like angry swells in a turbulent, stormy sea. Ferocious and wild, until the sun breaks through the clouds again and I find my breath and remember to keep treading.

I’m still learning and trying the best I can to ride the waves.

~ a revised except from my someday memoir