The Ocean of Grief
It's 5:13am on November 18, 2022. The body knows. It remembers, it wakes me up with a tightness in the chest. I search for my inhaler. It can only do so much. Over these past four months since Viggo died, I've experienced my grief as an ocean. My own private ocean. Sometimes it feels like a private ocean on a lonely planet where I am the only inhabitant. Sometimes I can step into the river of grief, that great rushing river that connects my grief to the grief of all the bereaved throughout all of time. The river is overpowering, communal, ancestral, bottomless. I belong there, too. The river of grief gives me perspective because it brings me into contact with the grief and loss of others, it reminds me I am not alone, it pushes me along and does not let me stay stuck in one place. The river is a transcendence. Not a transcendence of my grief but a transcendence into all grief. But this post is about my ocean. When Viggo died, I felt myself suddenly dropped into the middle of a