The Grief Swimming Pool

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” 

–Isak Dineson

After almost five years of caring and advocating for my dad, who had Lewy Body Dementia, I didn't know what to do with myself after he died. I was his caregiver and advocate and his beloved daughter. I adored him.

Months after he died, I would be out in the world and think, "I need to see Dad," the neural pathways still believing he was alive. Or I’d wonder why he didn’t call me. I would pick up the phone and dial his number before remembering he wouldn’t be picking up. I could relate to Joan Didion and her year of magical thinking. 

In caring for him, I experienced profound purpose and meaning. I had done a lot of anticipatory grieving since his diagnosis. I cried at least once every day for what he was losing and sometimes for losing the life I expected to live in those years. Seeing him struggle to walk and push through severely diminished stamina, taking him to Starbucks and talking politics, watching the Cubs together, going to the library to check out DVDs, laughing and cussing out Lewy, and talking about everything he wanted to talk about like his illness and death, was an honor and a joy. He loved to go on a drive that ended in the McDonald’s drive-thru for a vanilla cone.

My emotional chaos was similar to his, without the brain disease. However, grief itself does plenty to the griever's brain. I lost my attention span and couldn’t read anything but mysteries. I slept fitfully, thinking of everything I needed or wanted to do with him. Exhaustion was a constant companion. Running out of money for his care was a serious concern. Anti-depressants became a necessity to get through the anticipatory grief. I missed my pre-dementia life. We were all over the map, but I had to keep it all together. His spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being were mine to oversee. I cried every time I left his care home. 

Grief is a wild, unpredictable animal that appears suddenly without warning. That first year after Dad’s death, I had brain fog and memory lapses, a continuation of the tiny attention span, body aches, and pains. I expected to cry, but besides the deluge of loss, were all these symptoms grief?

While my grief portal was open, all the things that I had never grieved wanted to be grieved as well. For example, the projects I said no to because I didn’t think I could do it, the friendships I lost in my younger years due to my immaturity, or the writing I never tried to publish, to name a few. I called it the grief swimming pool. Of course, it is a saltwater pool. You name it, and it was yelling at me like a game of Marco Polo in my aunt’s swimming pool on a hot, humid Illinois afternoon with the kids in the neighborhood. Everything, old hurts and disappointments, jumped in and splashed, “I want to be grieved, too!” It was overwhelming.  

In year two, I understood that I would never see him again, which was much worse. I’ve cried oceans of tears since his diagnosis and death. I’ve tended to the other swimmers, too. Grief wasn’t much on my radar before Dad’s illness. Sure, I’d felt sad by losses in love and life. Walking around Target one day, I couldn’t stop thinking how many people around me were drenched in grief. 

I took a class on grief literacy from "Being Here, Human," where I learned that grief is not a feeling but “the body's involuntary response to a severed attachment.” And there is no such thing as grief recovery. I could only recover if Dad walked through the door right now. That made absolute sense to me. And since grief was a physical response, moving and using my body helped ease grief’s impact. The class also helped me understand that everyone grieves differently. When my husband lost his mother, how he experienced that grief looked entirely different from mine. 

Grieving is a part of life, but culturally, we often bypass it. Three days of leave for a significant loss doesn’t begin to address grief’s impact. If we love, we grieve. We grieve lost relationships, financial status, health, lost pets and people, the parent or the childhood we wished we'd had, loss of limbs and abilities, closeness with people we thought would be part of our lives forever, what we thought we had to do to be loved and discovered later we didn't need to do, opportunities we didn't pursue, and opportunities that never arrived.

Once, on a trip to Corsica to write with a group of women, Yvette, who hosted us at her home, told the story of her mother, who was dying. People in the village of Bastelica would stop by to see her mother and then have a whispered conversation outside the bedroom door with Yvette. One day, Yvette's mom said from her bed, "Come closer. I want to hear what's happening. I want to live until I die." 

Walking at a snail's pace with Dad and seeing his determination to live until he died, I had a deeper understanding and compassion for others. I can spot a caregiver a mile away. Like the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz" looking for a heart, I found deeper compassion and patience in my sorrow. I needed to find it because I also needed compassion for those who did not show up to help me. I can now see that they didn’t have the capacity to help. No one has any idea what is happening in another person's life. They may be drowning in some other kind of overwhelm or pain. Dad wanted to live until he died, and we did that to the best of our ability. I am laden with the gifts of that experience, but only I can say it was a gift.

January 8, 2024, was the fifth anniversary of his death. Grieving will never be over, but it has integrated over time. I remember more of his laughter. The grocery store aisle with the Little Debbie Oatmeal Pies will always be a crying hazard. The wild grief animal still shows up, but not as frequently, and the grief swimming pool has fewer swimmers. I pay more attention to them now and listen when grief calls to me to tend to it. I'm saying yes to experiences that will take me deeper into life and choosing not to deny grief. It’s proof of my love, and isn’t that why we are here?

I’d like to start a movement where we could all talk about our grief and not hide it. We could respond to the question, “How are you doing?” with “I’m having a tough day. I’m grieving.” Let's normalize grief.