Staying Afloat

In the years following my sister’s death, I fell, as so many people who have experienced loss do, into a dark abyss that seemed expansive, almost bottomless. Its darkness colored everything around me, everything within me. Every choice, every decision, every thought, every feeling was tinged with its shadow, impacted by its depths. Asking me to think about the future, to make plans in a way that served me in any real sense was absurd. And yet, that is what I felt was expected of me, what I expected of myself: to move forward and make normal decisions as if my life was in any way normal. It’s a widely-held misconception that we “move on” after the death of someone we love; that, eventually, the pain will give way to a sense of resumed normalcy where we will breathe a sigh of relief to have made it through. And, perhaps, there is a tendency to push those who are grieving to accelerate the process by pretending to be normal before they are ready – a “fake it til you make it/pull yourself up by the boot straps” approach to living life as if it is not completely shattered and forever marked by grief and the missing of the person who is no longer there. In our quest for some semblance of normalcy after loss, are we asking too much of ourselves? Do we rush too quickly into resuming normal life? Does that somehow keep us from really healing?

I see it like this: imagine you are literally drowning in an ocean. You are working with every ounce of energy within you to tread water, your arms and legs moving frantically below the surface to keep your head above the water line, to keep you from sinking to the bottom. The waves continually crash against you, rising above your head and pushing you under. You are swallowing water, struggling to breathe, and still you kick and swim and try desperately to keep from drowning. You feel utterly alone, often hopeless, praying for a way to survive, for a break in the waves, for a moment to lie back and float instead of constantly swimming against this current that forever threatens you. And then a boat approaches carrying someone you know – perhaps a loved one, a family member or a trusted friend – or maybe it’s several people – your boss, your coworkers, your teachers, your neighbors, the people in your social circle – and they are shouting to you. You strain to hear their voices above the sound of the crashing waves, the rhythm of the tide that fills your ears. They get closer, and you think perhaps they are preparing to throw you a lifeline or at least offer you some advice on how to keep afloat, how to survive. Instead, they begin to ask you questions: “What now? What are your plans? How are you going to move forward with your life? When can we expect you to be back to your old self? When will you return to normal?” 

“Normal?!” you ask. “How can I think about normal? How can I make any decisions right now? I am literally fighting for my life!”

“Oh, but…” they respond, “you have to start making plans. You have to get back to normal. You can’t blame these waves forever. Haven’t you learned to swim yet? You’ve been in the water for a while now. I thought you’d have gotten used to the current by now. Perhaps thinking about the future will take your mind off of the water. Perhaps if you get back to work, get back to living, you’ll feel better, more normal.” And so, even as you struggle, even as you feel the current pulling you out further, pulling you under, you begin to believe them. You tell yourself that you will focus on the horizon line that is the future instead of on your survival. You will focus on “normal” instead of your feelings. You will stop complaining about the waves and just learn to swim a little harder. 

After Cathy died, I was drowning, flailing about in the deep, dark water of my grief, unable to catch my breath, just barely keeping my head above the waves. I was tired, so deeply exhausted to my core, but I felt certain I couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t stop kicking and clawing at the water, or I would sink in the depths and drown. I desperately clung to whatever I could find to keep me afloat. And the closest thing I could find, the only other person close to me that wasn’t also fighting to not drown in the grief of her death, was my boyfriend, Patrik. 

Patrik and I had met 9 months earlier. He was one of the older students in my upper level English class of young adults at Akademie JA Komenskeho, the private language academy nestled along a cobblestoned street of Prague’s “Lesser Quarter” – Malá Strana – directly across from the US Embassy, in the shadow of Prazsky Hrad, the city’s 9th century castle. I had taken over Patrik’s class in March when the school had hired me just after completion of my month-long teacher training course. He stood out to me right away. He was handsome, outspoken, and confident, and he went out of his way to make me feel comfortable in my new role as the class’ instructor. When he approached me a few weeks later and asked to meet outside of class so he could practice his English with me over beers at a local pub, I felt nervous and unsure but also a little excited.

As we got to know one another over the next few months, spending hours together under the auspices of me helping him with his English, we’d talk about our childhoods, our past relationships, our hopes for the future. When our connection took a decided turn from friendship to something more romantic, more intimate, I was already well-aware of the relationship he was currently in. He had always been quite open about the fact that he lived with his Slovakian girlfriend of two years, and, although he told me that they often fought and did not get along, there was never any pretense of him leaving her for me. I’m not sure I wanted that anyway. As much as it shames me to admit it, I think I liked the fact that he was taken. His unavailability made the relationship feel safe to me – there was already an exit strategy in place, one that I believed would leave both of us unscathed at the end. In my head and my heart, I had come to expect that there would be a clean break to the relationship when I left at the end of my time in Prague, and I imagined we could both easily go back to our old lives as if nothing had happened. All along I had assumed I’d return to the US that December, just in time for the holidays, and resume my life in California. Since Cathy had recently become pregnant at the end of the summer, she and I had discussed her buying a condo or a small house in Long Beach with her fiancé and me moving in with them to help her care for the newborn baby when he arrived. I had already prepared my students for the fact that I wouldn’t be returning after the New Year for the second semester, and I’d only signed a lease for my apartment through the end of the calendar year. So much of my time abroad had felt like a fantasy life – I walked to work amid Gothic spires, across a 14th century bridge under the shadow of a Medieval castle; I was paid in a currency that felt like Monopoly money to me; I had very little responsibility aside from my job – which I loved – and paying my rent. This clandestine relationship with Patrik simply felt like one more piece of a dreamlike existence: lovely in the moment, but certain to end as soon as I awoke in the real world. 

I still wonder if that’s exactly what would have happened if Cathy had lived. I imagine I would have moved home to California, resumed my waitressing job until I figured out what to do next, maybe dated the sweet boy who had been waiting at home for me since I left, sending me care packages and mix-tapes during my time abroad. My romantic, almost exotic short-term relationship with Patrik would be just one more souvenir in the collection of memories I was taking home, an anecdote to include in the amusing stories I would regale my friends with of my “wild and crazy” time in Prague. It would have remained there, safely ensconced in my memories. 

But Cathy didn’t live. She died abruptly, unexpectedly, that December, before I could move home. Her sudden death brought gravity to something that had felt light, even a little frivolous. Suddenly, Patrik was something more than my secret Czech lover. He was the one who literally picked me up off of the floor of the post office after my knees buckled under me upon hearing my brother say the words, “She’s gone,” through the crackle of the phone line. Patrik’s was the hand that deftly guided me to the closest taxi that then carried us back to my apartment, where I crawled on my hands and knees up the stairs. His was the presence by my side throughout that evening as I oscillated between agonizing tears, rabid denial, and pitiful hope. He was the one who drove me to the airport the next morning in the dark, holding my hand as I stumbled towards the gate of the airplane that would deliver me home to the reality I was not yet ready to face. In the days and weeks after, as I tried to navigate the emotions that awaited me – the grief and anger, even the reverse culture shock of returning to a country I had not seen in a year – Patrik was the voice at the other end of the phone trying to comfort, soothe, and support me, and to offer me distraction from all of the feelings I was so desperately trying to shove away. A few months later, in the spring following Cathy’s death, when he announced that he was coming to the US to be with me, it didn’t occur to me what he meant. I thought he meant to visit me for a short time, to support me as I made my way through this loss, to bring a much-needed lightness to my dark existence. As we made plans and prepared for his arrival, I envisioned a vacation from my grief: a chance to forget all the heaviness I had landed in when I’d return home, a chance to return to the airiness that had defined our relationship in Prague. I think I somehow imagined that his presence would bring me up, out of my darkness, would help me move past my pain and loss and loneliness. I couldn’t begin to imagine how his presence might actually exacerbate my pain, would make it nearly impossible for me to process my grief or to sit in my sadness long enough to heal through it. He ended up staying in California with me for a full 6 months, a period in which we fought constantly and bitterly as I tried to navigate this new life with him while simultaneously trying to keep from drowning in my grief. When he finally was forced to return to Prague at the expiration of his tourist visa that fall, I didn’t feel ready to say goodbye to him with any real finality. I’d already experienced a massive loss in my life, was still reeling from Cathy’s sudden absence. I simply was not prepared to experience another one. Not yet. So, instead of ending the relationship as I should have, instead of acknowledging my need to feel my pain and to grieve and to heal without the added weight of a largely unhealthy relationship, I promised I’d return to Prague in a few months to join him. I thought that maybe, back in the place where our relationship had begun, we’d return to the kind of joy and romance we’d once experienced. Maybe I thought I could outrun my grief, perhaps hit rewind on the pain and sadness and excruciating discomfort of the past year, by leaving California again, returning to Prague. Or maybe I was just looking for a way to prolong the inevitable, to avoid the end, the goodbye, for as long as I could.

Whatever illusions I had of recreating some of my previous joy upon returning to Prague were quickly shattered. By then, most of my friends – the support system I’d enjoyed throughout my first tenure in that beautiful city – had moved on. I was left to rely on Patrik for everything. We lived in his apartment, socialized with his friends, spent evenings and weekends with his family. All of the freedom and independence I’d experienced in that first year abroad had vanished, and I was miserable. I had returned to the site of both the happiest and the darkest moments of my young adult life, and I had no way of processing those feelings, no one to go on long walks with to discuss all that was swirling in my head and heart. Not even a therapist I could turn to. And the fighting with Patrik continued and intensified, slowly destroying me. We fought about everything, it seemed, and the daily discord in our relationship kept me distracted from really processing the grief still buried deep inside me over the death of my sister. In so many ways, I was in greater danger of drowning then, back in Prague, than I had been in the entire year after Cathy’s death. Never before had I felt so threatened by that tide, so close to losing my battle against the crashing waves of my grief and loneliness. Looking back, hindsight allows me to see all of the signs that I was sinking into the depths of anxiety and depression, to see that what I really needed was to stop and focus on my survival in that present moment. Instead, even as I struggled to stay afloat, that metaphorical boat arrived, filled with people I trusted, and I heard them telling me to start making plans for my future. Perhaps they genuinely believed that if I started focusing on the life ahead of me, I’d be able to pull myself up out of the water on my own. Perhaps they couldn’t see how desperately I needed a lifeline.

I had been offered a job teaching at my old high school back home, a job that would require me to return to the US in August, just a few shorts months after arriving back in Prague. Still not ready to say a final goodbye to Patrik, unable to endure another loss, I began working hard to ensure we could return to the US together. Since Patrik had already used up the entirety of his tourist visa the year before, we attempted to secure a student visa for him to study at a college in California. When his application for the visa was denied, I was advised by the US consulate to find a different avenue by which to return to the states together. The consular general’s advice to me was clear and decisive: marry Patrik in Prague, and bring him to the US as my spouse. This diplomat’s advice, and the ensuing support for that advice from those closest to me, was based on the belief that I wanted to marry Patrik, something I had asserted to others even as I tried to convince myself of the same. Sometimes not wanting to lose someone is not the same thing as wanting to be with them, even though they look very similar. 

On July 4, 2003, in a courtroom in the Czech Republic, surrounded by a small group of his friends and family, I married Patrik. I was 25 years old at the time, still reeling from the sudden death of my sister, and without a single friend or family member of my own in attendance. The ceremony was entirely in Czech with a translator on hand to make sure I understood what I was getting into. As with so much of my life in Prague, the ceremony there and the marriage it established felt surreal, almost dreamlike. I felt as if I was adrift in a fog, watching my own life unfold before me without any sense of truly taking part in it. I floated along in it until I crashed headlong into the reality of that life upon our return to California. Even now as I look back, the months after we married remain largely a painful blur to me. There were moments of kindness and tenderness, happiness and affection, I’m sure. And I truly believe Patrik did the very best he could with what he had in his attempts to support and love me. Still, it was such a difficult time, one in which I remained mired in the feelings of loss and regret and sadness that I had tried so valiantly to keep locked away after Cathy died while simultaneously enmeshed in a relationship that was increasingly volatile and toxic. Eventually, the pain of staying in our marriage exceeded my fear of losing Patrik, and I was able to summon the courage I needed to finally accept the end that had always – from the very beginning – felt inevitable. Just 7 months after our Prague wedding, I ended my relationship with Patrik, first by moving out of our shared apartment and back into my childhood home with my parents, then by filing for legal separation and ultimately divorce. 

I wish I could say that divorcing Patrik was the move that finally allowed me to process my grief surrounding Cathy’s death; but in reality, our divorce left me awash in so much more grief, so many more dark feelings to swim through. My immediate feelings were of deep guilt, regret, sorrow, and shame. I felt guilty for leaving, for walking away from this person who loved me, who I had loved. I was filled with regret for jumping into a marriage I never really wanted, for acting with what felt like recklessness with another person’s heart. And there was so much new grief and sadness as I mourned yet another loss in my life. It felt as if I was experiencing another death, except I had chosen this one, had created it myself. And the shame was ever-present. I was ashamed of how I had behaved in our relationship, of what I had accepted and allowed, of who I had been. I felt ashamed for having acted so irresponsibly, marrying this person when I wasn’t ready. Mostly, I felt deep shame for the way in which I had so thoroughly betrayed myself. I still grapple with that shame, even now, nearly 20 years later. I recognize that wedding day as the moment I betrayed myself the most, a time when I heard my gut telling me not to do something, and I did it anyway. I ignored my instinct, shoved it down and swallowed its cries in order to do what I thought everyone else wanted for me. At the time, it felt like the next right thing. Well, maybe not the right thing; maybe just the next thing. I had convinced myself to listen to all of those voices on the imaginary boat who were urging me to ignore the waves, ignore the fact that I was drowning, and to focus on that horizon line in the distance. I ignored all of the warning signs that my heart, my mind, even my body had tried to send to me: the sadness, the constant sense of worry, the panic attacks. I followed, instead, what I thought was the voice of reason, the voices outside of myself that urged me to move on. I betrayed my inner knowing and instead followed the path of what I thought I was supposed to do.

Looking back on that time, I have come to believe that we miss our greatest chances for healing and growth in those moments when we choose to listen to the voices outside of ourselves rather than the voice within us, when we give priority to the supposed to over the deep knowing we already possess, when we opt for a return to “normal” over our own feelings. When I chose to heed those on the boat who were urging me to focus on the horizon line of the future, I found myself pushed further out into the rough sea, into the abyss of my grief and pain, drowning even deeper below its depths. I understand now that there is no “moving on” from Cathy, from her death, no matter how hard I may have tried to pretend things were normal. We don’t ever move one from the ones we have loved. We merely learn to live, somehow, with their absence. No matter what we hear being shouted from the boat, the horizon line isn’t some far off place that we need focus on in order to be ok. All there is, once we choose to face it, is the present moment, and that can sometimes feel dark and deep and overwhelming.

I’m reminded of the day, as a teenager growing up in Southern California, when I found myself caught in the pull of a rip current while playing in the waves off Huntington Beach. As a kid, we had always been warned about the dangers of getting caught in a rip every time we ventured out into the ocean. Concentrated and narrow like a channel, a rip current flows at a much faster pace than the water around it, cutting through the lines of breaking waves and moving out directly away from the shore, and getting caught in one can be deadly. The scariest part that day, out in the waves, was that I didn’t even realize what was happening to me until a lifeguard, who had watched me exhaust myself trying to swim back towards the shore, swam out and offered to help me make my way back in. Since trying to out-swim a rip current or to swim against it will most likely cause you to drown, lifeguards will tell you that the best way to survive in a rip is to breathe, keep your head above water, and let others know you need help. The lifeguard who came out to help me showed me how to escape the rip by swimming parallel to the shore. Since we weren’t fighting against the current, we could swim slowly, through the current, along the shoreline. In this way, eventually, we found our way out of the deadly pull of the rip, to calmer water and, from there, we could safely swim back in to shore. 

I see now that, in those initial years after Cathy died, I wasn’t merely treading water out in that deep sea of my pain and loss and sorrow. Rather, I was caught in a deadly rip current of grief, and fighting that current is what threatened to drown me. When I listened to those people on the boat urging me to move on, I was actually allowing myself get pulled too far out, the current pushing me so far beyond the shore that I had lost hope of ever reaching solid ground again. But I also know that there was no way that I could have swum directly against the current at that point, could not have faced my grief head on yet. The force of it was too strong and, like the rip current, would have drained me of the energy I needed to survive. Instead, what I needed was to take my time, to breathe and stay afloat, to ask for help. I needed to afford myself the time and space to swim, as slowly as I required, along the shore until I could find calmer water. 

If you find yourself caught in the rip current of your grief, know that it will not last forever. Give yourself time. If all you can do right now is just keep your head above water, that is enough. The rip current itself will not drown you, will not pull you under. But fighting against it might. Breathe. Stay afloat. Ask for help. Eventually, you will find your way out of the deadly current and swim in calmer waters. Eventually, you will find your way back to shore.

And if you’re in the boat, if you’re watching someone you care about struggle against the rip current of their grief, throw them a lifeline. Tell them it’s ok to stop swimming and just breathe. Tell them it’s ok to take all the time they need to wait out the unrelenting pull. Don’t urge them on, no matter how well-meaning that advice may feel to you. Perhaps, you can guide them as they swim parallel to the shore, through the strong current into calmer water. Maybe all you can do is just sit with them out there in the water while they wait it out. If you can, offer them something to hold on to so they don’t feel so alone, so adrift in the waves. Or, if you aren’t able to do any of that, just wait for them on the shore, and be there to welcome them back to solid ground when they are finally able to swim back on their own.

Recently, I came upon an old photograph of me. It was taken by a friend in the little studio apartment that I rented in Long Beach, back when I was just starting to try to rebuild my life following the divorce. In the picture, I’m sitting at a round table just outside the kitchen. There is a vase of flowers that I bought for myself sitting on the table. The walls of my little apartment are bathed in the warm glow of an early evening sun through the windows that faced out on the courtyard of the apartment building. I look tired, worn out, like someone who has just reached the beach after swimming for a very long time. But I’m also smiling. My smile reaches my whole face – my eyes, my cheeks, my mouth – all of it showing a determined, if uncertain, happiness. I look at this photograph, at the face of a younger me, and I am overcome with emotion. I cry with sadness, remembering all that poor girl had just gone through: the sudden death of her sister, the betrayal of herself as she married someone she knew she shouldn’t, the verbal and emotional abuse she endured, even as she tried so hard, single-handedly to keep them both afloat in that relationship, and the devastating guilt she felt at finally leaving. I cry with pride – a deep and genuine pride – at all that sweet girl overcame; all that she did to protect and nurture herself in every way that she could; all the ways she worked to rebuild herself bit by bit even though she felt afraid and often alone; how she vowed to never betray herself again; and how she continued to have the courage to love, to have her heart broken again, to not let her pain overcome her hope. I am so proud that she never stopped believing she had great things ahead of her, even if she couldn’t, for the life of her, imagine what they would look like or how she’d ever get there.

After all these years, I am still learning to forgive myself and to offer myself some grace. I recognize now that, in those moments in which I betrayed myself, I was simply trying not to drown, grappling blindly for some form of certainty when my life felt thrown into the murky black of the deep, dark ocean. In my drive to survive, to not succumb to the force that threatened to pull me down and drown me, I chose to cling to the closest thing that could keep me afloat. And I continued clinging until I was strong enough to swim on my own. And through much time and hard-fought attention to my own healing, I ultimately made it back to shore, to the solid ground of a life built upon choices made with full intention and the light of awareness rather than decisions colored by the darkness of my grief and despair.