Left Behind in the Sorrow

Grief is the feeling we are expected to feel when one dies. There is a grace period you are granted while you pull yourself together. The world offers you the hollow "I am so sorrys", the "do you have someone you can talk to" and the "make sure to take time for your self to process" well wishes. But this period is also expected to be finite. Everyone expects it to begin and end with death and for you to move on. What no one talks about is the sorrow you will feel leading up to the death and how it lingers long after you lose someone meaningful.  

Grief has a way of way of hitting you like a ton of bricks all at once. The wave hits you so suddenly and churns you in so many directions that you have no choice but to accept its numbing cold so that your adrenaline can kick in and you can fight your way to the surface as quickly as possible. It's a survival tactic of the heart, mind and body so that you can get through the motions and horror of planning wakes, saying goodbyes and packing up of belongings. 

I know a lot about about grief because 2020 was one big wave hitting me after the other. Pummeling me and daring me not to get back up. 

In late 2019 I lost my very first professional mentor. An amazing woman who founded a natural makeup company in a little attic in SE Portland. When I first moved to Portland, I was hired to help her build her website in the early days of her company. She went on to grow it to a globally recognized brand by being one of the hardest working and kindest women I’ve ever known in business. We worked together through three re-designs as her business expanded and afterwards as my career grew and changed and my own family expanded she stayed in touch, a constant source of wisdom and support. One mother to another. One woman to another. Friends. In a cruel twist of fate this woman, full of so much drive and enthusiasm for life, was diagnosed with ALS. A terrible degenerative disease. Fortunately she didn't have to suffer the cruelty of it for too long.  

In February of 2020, I lost another mentor, my surf instructor. I had never surfed a day in my life until I met him. I had just had my third baby months before and was feeling like, well how most moms of three probably feel, overwhelmed, overweight and just over it in general. But I took a lesson anyway for a friends birthday and mainly to get over my fear of the open ocean. He patiently encouraged me, taught me how to pop up and to read and catch waves. He didn't balk or act uncomfortable if I had to stop surfing to pump for my baby. He told me it was the most bad ass thing I could be doing and because of it I could do anything. He told me that my life wasn't over that it was just at the beginning of greatness and I started to believe it, because I looked at him and knew he believed it. He went on to become a beautiful friend who taught each of my three little boys to surf, outfitted them with their first wetsuits and went tide-pooling with them when the waves were too rough to surf. In 2019 he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer. A man, who loved nothing more than to paddle out, was suddenly forced to watch waves through a beach cam on his laptop. As he got sicker, I visited him on the Oregon Coast, not ready to let him go. One day we hugged on the beach and just cried. We didn't need to say words we just looked at the water together and knew all we needed to know. It was just between us and that ocean. The last time I saw him before the cancer took his ability to comprehend and speak, he told me not to waste time and not to go through life too gently. He was told he would die in weeks. He held on for four more months. In true form he did not go gently. We planned a paddle out in his honor after he died, then Covid struck. We never had that goodbye. 

Just a short time later in March of 2020, I lost my niece. She had down syndrome and her favorite thing to call me was Uncle Sheryl. She thought it was hilarious. It was our special thing. A language just between us. She contracted what we thought was a simple respiratory illness, but then it quickly followed the same pattern as Covid 19. It was the early days of chaos surrounding the pandemic so she wasn't tested right away and by the time she was, things were inconclusive. She died of acute respiratory failure after more than three weeks on a ventilator. She didn't know what was happening to her while she was in the hospital so they had to drug her and strap her down to keep her from pulling her ventilator out. They only allowed my sister to be with her because of her Downs and because my sister was previously a registered nurse, otherwise she would have died alone. In the end it was my sister that had to choose to pull the ventilator from her baby. A task no parent should ever have to weather. We still haven't had her funeral. 

In November of 2020 I lost my third and last remaining close mentor. He was a leader where I work and I was paired with him in a reverse mentor program years ago to teach him digital. The short of it is we developed an unlikely friendship and when the required mentor sessions were done, we kept them rolling voluntarily. Our relationship was like catching waves in whitewater, there was no pressure to impress, no judgement, just a safe place to find our balance. He too was taken by cancer, one that he'd quietly fought for years, but in the end took him too fast. We didn't get the last proper goodbye and glass of red wine we had planned and had always put off for less important things. 

So grief? Yeah, I am an expert at this point. And there has been more loss for my family and I since November, but it is still too raw to process it here.

I expected the grief, but the part I hadn't calculated was the sorrow. Sorrow is more cunning and cruel. It's acts more like a sneaker wave. You can get through the initial grief but then be walking along the beach in the sunshine feeling relatively safe and out of nowhere a sound, a smell, or a memory rips through you like lightening. You feel it sweep you off your steady feet and the more you try to fight against it the more it pulls you out to sea. Some days sorrow can make you feel like you are drifting alone for days on end and you are waving up to the sky hoping someone will see you and pluck you out of it. But, because you are past the allotted grief grace period, it is hard for people to hear about your sorrow let alone understand it. Some think you are making it all about you. And you are. You should be. But it’s hard for people to spot that you may need help amongst all the other the white caps in life, so there you remain, un-rescued, no adrenaline left to fight it waiting for the sorrow to decide to let you go and sweep you back to shore. Grief cuts bold and short. Sorrow cuts deep and long. 

But the waves of sorrow, like grief will move through you eventually. And you’ll realize that something is always left behind in the wake of each of the incredible person you lose.

Its probably no coincidence that during a pandemic I accidentally found myself starting a small side business from my own SE Portland attic. Kate made me believe I could. That in 2020, I did anything but waste time or go through life gently. I started solo hiking for the first time and tackled 10 hikes myself, 22 in total. Gaz didn't waste his time, so I won't either. I learned to laugh deliriously with my three beautiful children and taught them to honor the silly language they will only ever have with each other. Meghan insisted on that. But most importantly I learned to take the pressure valve off myself and my friendships, to grant myself grace to just hang out in the whitewater and catch the easy waves sometimes. Al recognized that all paths have value and the only right one is the one you are on today. A wave after all is just a wave, and the sorrow will pass. 

In honor of the four incredible humans I lost and the gifts they left behind for me in the sorrow, I have decided to donate 5% of all my profits in 2021 to charities I know they would love. The ALS Aliance for Kate, the Down Syndrome society for Meghan, The Ocean Cleanup for Gaz and The Cancer Research Institute for Al. May you rest in peace my beautiful teachers.