Swimming Through Grief
People do weird shit when their kid dies. I started swimming in the San Francisco Bay. Although it’s not that weird if by weird you mean no one else is doing it. There are close to 3,000 members of the two swimming and rowing clubs in this slightly sheltered cove at Aquatic Park, and a lot of them kept swimming during COVID-19, along with the triathletes in wetsuits and the evicted pool swimmers. In the nine months I’ve been swimming there most days, I’ve never once not seen at least three other swimmers, no matter the weather or conditions.
I do and don’t understand why my son killed himself. I’d like to go, myself, sometimes. And, like him, I don’t come across as morose. I feel him sometimes as a being of light, and joy, and love; this was his essence, even when he was here. And sometimes not. Sometimes there was anger, frustration, cynicism.
One of the things about grief is you can know there are stages, know what they’re called, but you go through them in your own time and not neatly. “It’s like a scribble,” my grief counselor offered. I didn’t really have denial, not after the first insane incomprehensible phone call. I never woke up thinking it wasn’t real, that he wasn’t gone. And yet if bargaining is a conversation, a decision I could have made differently in the last twenty-two years that would have made him act or decide differently: bargaining is my near companion. Because a thing about losing a loved one is you want them back, and you’d do anything — literally anything — to get them back. I got him back in the form of ash, in the smell of the fresh laundry he’d washed, a touch of cologne and shampoo and the scent of him on the stuffed animal pillows at school, at home. His dog/my dog. I could go on, and on. So much reminds me of him, and I feel him all around. And yet he is gone.
We meaning-making creatures want to make sense of everything, and maybe especially the hard things. How and why: so that I can prevent bad things from happening to the people I love, the animals, the things, the planet: all these things that I see as mine, and want to protect.
I look out at water on a rough day, a smooth day. Its surface edged in white, green, blue, grey. It’s visceral, this wanting to go in, and the desire to stay out. To clean my mind with the shock to my body, the fast breathing, skin beginning to tingle with something like pain as I swim, breast stroke head up, until I’m used to it, and until I put my head down and arms up like I learned in the swim class I took for my birthday after he died, balancing streamlined in Superman pose, suspended in the salt water — torso, hips, legs in a line — and I begin to stroke, the soles of my feet already gone numb if the temperature’s below 53: not comfortable, not uncomfortable. Moving, bobbing, ears plugged against the cold, green murk through goggles below, a glimpse of surface and sky-boat-pier, hills of Angel Island and Tiburon, green murk again, three strokes, beach, a figure, city skyline, or the morning sun blinding.
I crave the water because it stills my mind.
The experience of swimming in cold water changes all the time, the way the body acclimates, the way the presence that’s required for each moment shifts, or is shifted. I’ve only cried twice in the water since September: you can’t, it’s not safe. It’s hard to breathe, and you could drown, so I stopped, maybe literally caught my breath, and swam on. When I’m alone — three days a week I swim with a friend, and often we swim out into the cove — but when I’m alone, I swim parallel to the shore. Even then I’m often a hundred yards out. There is nothing but swimsuit, two caps — a thermal and a silicone — goggles, earplugs, between me and the air and water. I learned from reading Lynne Cox’s books: when you’re frightened, look at your hands. When I drink in a wave, when I think too much about the wild things, when I brush against something not water — sea grass, jellyfish — “count” she recommends, and this is what I do. When I want to get out but I also want to stay in, I sometimes count to a hundred and start again at one. Sometimes I reduce it just to “one” with every bubbling out-breath. One, and one, and one.
When I’m with my friend, it’s just me, the water, her, the dawn light rosy on her face, the Golden Gate bridge lit red behind her, the water blue silk, iridescent pink: magic. Or greenish grey on an overcast morning, the sun one pale spot through cloud as we stop past a sailboat moored overnight, treading water halfway through our swim but also out of time, nowhere else: just here. Popping our goggles up on our swim caps, turning all around, free. Lying back in the water and feeling the current carry us. Basking in this beauty: literally in it. “It’s so beautiful!”
The stress on the body, the numbing, afterward the loss of motor control, the shaking, the rewarming: in my experience of living through loss, swimming interrupts and eases the thoughts and feelings that make my heart ache, my throat tighten, my whole being an agony of emptiness. In the cold I am me but I am not spinning-thought me. I am released somehow.
This moment, the one we’re in, the only one we have, is the one where I find solace. This breath in and this breath out. This shoulder and hip up and this down. This kicking and breathing, not kicking and screaming. This loving, this leaving, this being left behind, this being subsumed in the feeling of loss, like an addiction, an obsession.
“A possession,” my grief counsellor offered. Which I took with some relief to mean: the relentless thinking about my beloved son being gone was not something I willfully create.
And after: a friend, warming in a sunny spot one afternoon after his swim, when I asked: how are you? Called out “I’m high as a fucking kite.” That too. Endorphins, anti-inflammatory response, there are a few studies, but ask any cold water swimmer and they’ll tell you: while you’re swimming, and after you’re warm again, you feel good. There is no other way to feel. Surely that is why I do it: to feel good.
I read that feathers are a message from angels. I see them, swim past them, in the water and say hello: Hi, George. September, October, must be molting season in Northern California, because I swam past a lot of feathers. I wondered how the birds felt about this, especially a whole dead bird on the sand at the beach: did the angels ask your permission before turning you into a carcass covered in messages?
Recently someone told me seeing a dead bird is good luck. A sign of new beginnings. I’d just seen a pigeon on a sidewalk. And then something hard to identify, probably a pigeon, in the road. Okay, I thought. I’ll take that: you dead bird, this new beginning. I’ll take anything.
I was sick a couple of weeks before George died. It’s a thing I can feel guilty about — as if any of us have control over things in the past — that I was focused on myself. I’d rescheduled the voice lesson he was giving me, then he rescheduled the last day he was alive because he and his roommates were having a barbecue. We talked after dinner that night, at 9 PM his time, about school and classes and work. And at the end: Good night; love you.
My digestive system’s been off and on since, and I started cutting irritants out of my diet. Dairy, refined sugar, chocolate. No glass of wine at the end of the day. No coffee at the beginning.
Anything that can make me feel better without someone else feeling worse. Is that life force? The thing that chooses to look at the leaf buds on the sky-reaching branches of spring trees; that pauses for the Mallard duck pair to waddle across the sand; that just at water’s-eye-view spots the cormorant’s sleek black body disappear head first with barely a ripple; that startles mid-stroke as ten feet away a pelican dives, exploding into the water; that catches the black eye of a gull paddling past, rising and falling together in the same swell; that feels the minnow slip between fingers unseen; that chooses day after day to walk into the water, not with rocks in its pockets, but with eyes open, arms rising in Superman pose, fingers open like stars, body tipping in, breathing deep and fast and even into the cold, ever-changing water, to finding relief.
