The Gentle Art of Learning to Drown

The case for sadness.

When I was a very little girl, I would often sink to the bottom of the pool. In the deep end, beside the diving board ladder, I could weep with abandon. In high school, I was drawn to Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier. And years later when I returned from Antibes, after studying with the Her Majesty’s chandler, the first candle that I dreamt of pouring was one that could capture the final, sea-soaked, passage:

“She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her Father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.”

To this day, when I’m near someone in pain, my ears are filled with (what I can only describe as...) the steel-on-steel sound, from the bottom of the lake - just off the dock, of a boat passing above. I’ve often waited, when I’m with friends or family, to cry in the shower. Alone. The impulse to conceal sorrow, whether learned or instinctual, has been as steady as a heartbeat. As natural, to me, as breath . The one thing you won’t find 5 feet beneath the pool ladder or just off the dock on the sandy bottom of the lake. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to swim.

But it took me 43 years (and the respiratory fight of my life) to learn how to drown.

I learned to swim before I learned to walk.

“I got it from my Mama. I got it from my Mama.”

Driving home from the Acupuncture Clinic, my chest was drenched. I hadn’t cried that hard... maybe... ever. It was a bottomless wail that came from a place in my mind, or in my body, that I can’t even give a name to. And it came involuntarily out of me with the force of every heartbreak, every loss, every abandonment I had ever suffered.Unlike waves of grief, that ten minute ride home is comparable - only - to the current that once swept me half way round a Bahamian island. It was the eighteenth day of suffering symptoms I assumed were related to a positive test for influenza A. In hindsight, I can’t help but wonder...

On the seventh of January, I had hit a wall. I was bathing up to six times a day, to keep fever and nerves at bay. And, by night, I was coughing. It was an inescapable cough, a relentless cough. The cough was sovereign. And my thoughts raced back and forth from the whimsical but dead-straight wish to leave my body for a minute to the absolute panic and fear of knowing that “this” was worse than anything my body had ever battled. I could only sleep, once I piled five or six pillows behind me, sitting straight up and for no more than twenty or thirty minutes. A steam inhaler worked for a few minutes here. I convinced myself that weeping onions were going to save the day - there. I took acid reducers and allergy meds. Nothing REALLY helped. My sardine had started to “slip off the cracker.” So, knowing I would be unable to take the steroids an MD would want to prescribe, I contacted an Acupuncturist. Luckily, she was able to see me the next day. I went into her office dangling from a tattered and fraying thread.

I only felt one of the many pins that she used. The one placed in association with phlegm. It coursed it all the way up and down my leg. And during the session, I felt it with every single cough. Up and down my leg. In a follow-up, I told her about my experience on the way home, and in the days that followed. I tried, albeit feebly, to accurately describe the depth and vigor of my sorrow. And she shared something with me, in response. “In Chinese medicine, different emotions are said to be stored in different parts of the body, and grief is stored in the Lungs. So as we released your Lung energy with Acupuncture, it makes a lot of sense to me that you would be experiencing that emotion as it comes up and, hopefully, out. As uncomfortable as it is I see it as a positive sign of things stuck in your Lungs starting to resolve.”

Chew on that one more time. “As uncomfortable as it is I see it as a positive sign of things stuck in your Lungs starting to resolve.” Allow it to sit with you for a moment.

The gravity of her words has, in the past few weeks, become a touchstone for me. As soon as I heard them, I got it. I softened to the idea of embracing my grief. I began to sit down so that it might have a moment of its own. And in those moments, I opened up to being present with my sorrow. It became an unexpected kindred. A treasured relief. And I all but cold-turkey stopped hiding it. By the time a Covid-19 case had been confirmed in the United States, it all seemed like a distant memory. An awful dream. Until several friends sent me an article from the Harvard Business Review entitled “That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief.”

The article, as it was intended, is a lovely piece. But, given my recent experience, I couldn’t help but wonder if its poignance was even more deeply rooted than it appeared at first glance. The physical discomfort that I felt in my lungs? That was grief. Repressed grief. Physical respiratory pain and distress that moved in and didn’t go anywhere until I started gently allowing it, my grief, to take me under. So here’s the question.

Are we weathering the storm of a Global Pandemic that feeds on the suppression of grief?

I’m inclined to believe we are. A cultural obsession with happiness, and calm, and positive outlooks, and “a place of yes,’ and living abundantly... measured by followers, and likes, and “friend” counts, and metrics and access to (shoot me now - literally AND figuratively) an abundance of natural light. We’ve become so laser-focused on JOY that we forgot to be sad.

I forgot.

When my Grandmother left us, suddenly - in 2016, I attempted (and approximated some degree of success) to outrun the wave of grief. In a head-spinning turn of events, the locks to her house were changed - with an abundance of efficiency. And, when I realized that I couldn’t truly ever go back to *HONEY’S* house ... the emotional slam heard round the cul-de-sac urged me to tear off in pursuit of any place but there. I hid out at my sister’s house, in the fortress of her little’s hugs and giggles. I crisscrossed the country. I put miles and miles and miles on my Grandmother’s car - one that I was required to purchase at the topdollar/newtires/bluebook price. Spoiler alert! It did not have new tires. In fact the bumper wasn’t even fully attached. The premium I paid, was for the sentimental attachment I couldn’t shake off. When I was nudged out of the crevice-of-a-foothold that I maintained in our “family’ business with ONLY a text message and a string of email reminders from someone (whom I have always been known to be there for) to pay my Rotary dues, I threw myself into work. I drove Uber 16/18 hours a day. Often sleeping in the car. Even when a relative-by-marriage bullied me out of my home with an urgency to sell it, only to watch her let it sit there without so much as a sign in the yard. For months. Even then, even after all of that, I cried very little. And focused on becoming as comfortably numb as possible.

(Please allow that paragraph to stand in for any “well where have you beens” that may linger from my sudden and prolonged vanishing act. It’s a monumental challenge to maintain a regular writing schedule when you’re either on the fly, working yourself into the ground, or attempting to numb it all on any given day. The simple answer is: I have been everywhere. And nowhere at all. And then I fell in LOVE and moved to Athens.)

For the most part, I told myself that I didn’t have time to cry.

But I did. Have time, that is. I simply forgot. My body did not forget. However. Our bodies don’t forget. They have not forgotten the sadness. Or the losses. The abandonment. Or the utter finality of heartbreak. Of endings. They’re just, I suspect, hoarding it all in our lungs. And our Lungs, “our” meaning humanity, are ill equipped for the battle in front of us. In this sink-or-swim moment, maybe SINK is the route you want to take. Drown. Succumb to the mournful wail of every single discomfort you’ve ever swallowed. If you can’t? Try “The Way We Were” or “Cinema Paradiso” or “Terms of Endearment.” One of those Budweiser commercials. Whatever “gets you every time?” Go that way. Mosey on down that road.

Hard reset. Isn’t that the buzz phrase that’s hovering in drones these days?

“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” Said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today.” 

Lewis Carroll

In studying any art form, there is typically an underlying truth to mentally master. With drowning, I’m convinced that it’s this: it only spits you out once you surrender to it. Once you stop fighting it. And, at the moment that you ever so gently let go, it begins to loosen grip. If I’m right... that just might save your life.