“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” Isak Dinesen
Death, loss, heartache, trauma. They were all things I experienced very early and consistently in life. But grief? That took me 49 years to get to.
My first recollection of death was when I was nine. My father’s only brother, older than him, died unexpectedly at fifty from a heart attack. My father idolized him. They were close growing up but lived far apart. There was talk of taking me to the funeral. I think it came down to airfare we couldn’t afford. I never saw my father cry. We never talked about it. It became just a fact, talked about like what we would have eaten for dinner.
Decades later, when his older and favourite sister was dying in hospital from cancer, I wanted to visit. He told me not to. What’s the point? When I saw her she was frail and incoherent. I was sad, but also — this is life. This is what happens. Neither of us cried. We didn’t talk about it. When she died he sent a simple email that said as much.
My mother wasn’t any different. My favourite uncle, her uncle actually, committed suicide when I was young. He gave no indication he was depressed. He had his affairs in order and then, without telling anyone, he was gone. He was a gay man who had lived as a straight man his whole life. I think that conflict became overwhelming. Growing up, I didn’t get much family warmth or gifts. But every Christmas he made sure I had a Lego set. He always encouraged my creativity, even when no one else did. I don’t remember anyone crying over his death. I remember a lot of talk about suicide being selfish.
Other deaths followed. A close school friend hit by a bus. Friends who died in a skydiving accident. Another in a skiing accident and another in a plane crash. I had over a dozen surgeries between nine and nineteen, and I can’t recall crying in any of them. When I read my old hospital notes years later, they all said the same thing: she doesn’t cry or fuss. Very quiet.
Grief was not something I ever felt or understood. I saw it in films. I saw it in friends. I didn’t get it.
In 2023 I lost a friend that I’d known for two decades to suicide. I had alcoholic parents and a bipolar sister who was an addict, people who looked like they were functioning on the outside but inside there was just so much going on. My friend struggled with the same challenges. I logically understood her situation but couldn’t fully empathise, because I’ve always been sober and haven’t had personal addiction or mental health issues. My way of coping with people who did was to keep calm and carry on. Her death was probably the closest I got to feeling grief, because she was my age, and her pain and situation was the most understandable to me. For months afterward I’d still check her site out of habit, forgetting she was gone, and each time I realised she was gone, I’d get close to grieving. But I never fully got there. I never cried.
In November 2023, I had two unexpected lung surgeries. It was initially thought to be cancer. It turned out to be a rare fungal infection called Valley Fever. During my recovery, my dog Scout got sick. I had to wait ten days until I could drive to take her to the vet, only to learn she had end stage bone cancer. Most of the bone in her jaw and head had been destroyed. She didn’t have much time.
Two days after that news, I was laid off from my job.
The day I took Scout in to be put to sleep, I was stoic. Frozen, probably. I did it alone. Afterward I sat in the car in shock. A friend came over a few days later. Months later she told me I had just been not there. No emotions. Gone.
When the shock wore off, I went into deep grief.
Living alone, not working, recovering from surgery, in winter. It was a perfect storm. For the first time in decades I cried. I didn’t move from the couch except for basic recovery walks. I talked to no one. I felt everything deeply for the first time. Strangely, it was a blessing.
I’d had pets die before. My cat Grace, who I got at twenty three, lived all over the world with me for sixteen years. She died at home while I was in Denmark. When I got the call I was really upset. My mother simply said: that’s sad, dinner’s ready. It was Easter. There was family, celebration. I never got to grieve. I didn’t learn what that felt like.
Everything was always just matter of fact. Something happened. You accept it. You move on. No use crying over spilled milk. No use crying over anything. No use feeling.
So I didn’t. Until Scout.
I grieved hard for a year. Once I started I just didn’t want to stop, because I started grieving more than just Scout, my surgery, my job. I grieved all my losses. I grieved my friends. I grieved for the little girl who went through so many hard things. I openly talked about being in grief because I understood that I had this small window of time where it was acceptable to feel how I was feeling without any pressure to stop so I just gave into it for as long as I needed. A cross-country road trip with my niece eventually helped bring me through it.
When I hear people talk about grief now, why it matters to fully go through it, I understand. I’m glad I unknowingly had the time and finally the ability to just be in it. To go through it. To come out the other side.
It changed me in a monumental way. I feel things differently now. I understand things differently. I’ve always been empathetic but it’s on a whole other level now, where I can actually feel the sadness, feel the pain alongside someone rather than just recognising it from a distance. I think about my friend and how now I would have had a whole different ability to support, even if her ending was the same.
Scout’s death shattered and broke me open so that I could put myself back together in a way that made me whole in a different and better way. I turned fifty the February after she died. People always say that age changes you and that grief is an unexpected gift. Two things I had to fully open to experiencing to fully understand to be true. And while I miss Scout so fiercely, I like to think that if there is such a thing as souls, she came into my life to help me learn how to feel so that I could go through my second act with my heart wide open, able to cry just as I can laugh, to understand pain and not just move past it, and to become far more compassionate in a way that has already transformed how I connect with others, especially my nieces. And I’m so thankful for that.