Mourning Surf: What I Learned About Grief When I Paddled Out
Photo: Sarah Lee
Books on grief, loss and mourning have crowded out the other books on my shelves. I’ve read a few of these often harrowing accounts of losing a loved one, dipping into a few chapters here and there and avoiding those that sounded too sad as I have tried to come to terms with my own devastating loss – of my beloved husband Jim from brain cancer at 53.
In the first few weeks and months after Jim died I couldn’t read anything or listen to music. Not even talk radio. A total blackout. I couldn’t go near anything that might plunge me deeper into sorrow than I already was. What did offer comfort in those early days, in ways I never imagined, was surfing.
I’ve learned more about grief and mourning by surfing than I have from any book. I don’t just mean gliding along the wave, but the whole ritual practice of suiting up, paddling out and being in the water, waiting through the lulls or thrashing towards an outside set. Surfing became my way of working through the grief of losing my husband and the painful process of mourning him.
Although I didn’t grow up surfing, my father and his brothers did. I spent many afternoons down at Rincon, our local surf break, playing in the sand while my dad caught waves. I wish now I had asked him to teach me to surf. I didn’t take a surf lesson until I moved back to California after finishing graduate school in New York. In my mid-thirties I joined a women’s surf class offered through the city of Santa Monica. From the moment I paddled out for my first time, I was hooked. Back then I couldn’t even ride a wave for very long, but being in the water with new girlfriends and re-connecting with something that reminded me of my father brought me great joy.
I became a regular down at the beach. Some of the locals were prickly at first, wary of a newcomer, but most were friendly and offered me a place in the line-up once I had proven myself a bit. Gradually, I went from clueless beginner to someone who could maneuver her board down the face of a wave. Finally, after 15 years of surfing regularly I became a confident surfer. When Jim was diagnosed and started going through treatment I surfed a bit less, although he was very supportive of surfing as an outlet for me. When his health began failing my sessions dropped off, and when he went into hospice I stopped surfing all together.
But the year after Jim died I surfed almost every day, even on small days or when the surf was blown out. I surfed during steep tides and on days too big for my skill level because if I did not paddle out, I felt I would not make it. Mornings were the hardest. I couldn’t be in the house without my husband to have our usual cup of coffee together. As if by instinct, I would head to the beach. In the face of huge swells of grief and sorrow, surfing taught me how to thrust myself forward into the curl of the unknown.
It might seem strange to think of surfing as a grief practice. Long celebrated for its “good vibes,” and for the fantasy of the “stoke” and sense of escape, could surfing have as much to do with mourning as it does with pleasure? My daily ritual of paddling out, whatever the conditions, provided a way for me to channel my sadness and to move into it.
Some days, I was sobbing before I hit the water. I lay down on my board in the sand and clung to it, as if to buoy myself against a tidal wave of grief. At 6 feet my board was as tall as my husband was; turned upside down in the sand I would fall on it and weep, somehow wanting to merge with the board, to feel for a moment that I was held.
Photo: Theresa Hoey
Usually, though, it was in the water that my emotions would swell. In these moments the water was my mirror, illuminating and bringing into focus what was shadowed within myself. Surfing was a way for me to confront the fear, anxiety and anger I felt at having been left to endure without my partner, to raise our daughter alone, to be alone. It was then I realized that surfing could bring things, sometimes dark things, to the surface.
I find myself turning to surf metaphors as I go through this process – that grief really does come in waves and I must learn to ride them. Wave after wave after wave after wave after wave; an internal squall. Grief is cataclysmic submersion – it’s like falling into the sea and not knowing how to swim. In the beginning I longed to be pulled down to the depths of the ocean, to surrender to its undertow. Author Julian Barnes wrote of his experience after the death of his wife that for him, “Grief is vertical, it has immense depth – while mourning is horizontal. Grief snatches your breath and makes your stomach drop, mourning moves you in a new direction.” Surfing set me in motion – through the precarious, slippery, ever shifting ground of a wave. Surfing compels me to navigate a wave’s vertical drop and its horizontal loft, and to somehow shape these disparate movements into a unified rhythmic gesture – onward. Every wave surfed becomes an unfurling narrative of future possibility. Surfing crosscuts between grief and mourning, between the undertow and the upwell, and from that struggle in and with the waves emerges an idea of what is possible.
During that first year I also struggled through grief counseling sessions that left me ravaged by the sheer unmitigated depths of my despair. I was told to say, “This is hard to bear,” instead of, “I can’t bear this,” because, ultimately, I did have to bear it. I had to find a way to move through my grief instead of being immobilized by it. As I sought ways of explaining to my therapist how it felt to be without Jim I found myself thinking about surfing; without my husband I felt like I was surfing on a board without a fin, sliding and falling where once I had been stable. He was my anchor and his presence tethered me and gave me direction. Surfing offered me not merely an image to convey my emotions, but an action – as my board moves me I try to find my balance. The waves become my partner as I adapt to the spontaneity of the water in an improvised dance. The constant movement of the ocean helps to keep me moving too. The ocean is never a passive force. As Karin Amimoto Ingersoll writes in her book Waves of Knowing, “When I enter the sea, I enter a process of reimagination as the power of the ocean continually reshapes me…” The waves sometimes slap against my face, hold me under or flip me upside down, but they also bear me forward, a reminder that the sea has its own designs.
Sometimes I am caught in an undertow of grief where without warning I am pulled down deep, nearly drowning in a surge of emotion. I have learned these episodes are called “grief spasms” and they can come out of nowhere like a rogue wave of heartache. In these moments I force myself to “lie up” in the words of poet Philip Booth: “…lie up, and survive” he instructs in his poem First Lesson, and I must do so for my daughter’s sake. In the final lines of the poem he references what I have come to understand and appreciate most this past year – that mourning is a process that must be moved through. Surfing has become my way of traversing the grieving waves; As Booth’s poem recommends; “…lie gently and wide to the light-year stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.”
I became quite attached to my morning paddle out. I loved listening to the sounds on the water; surfers chatting between sets, the cry of the gulls and the music of the waves. As I tuned-in to the greater harmonies of water, wind, sea and sky I began to interpret my surroundings; each wave a unique signature, each set a paragraph of mounting tension and suspense, each session a blank page to be inscribed. To paraphrase John Muir, in paddling out, I was padding in. What is grief but an undercurrent? As I would scan the horizon for waves I came to understand that there are waves beneath the waves. I later learned that waves are shaped by disturbances, disruptions that move through water, pushed by winds from above and rebounding off the reefs and shelves below: The discernable beauty of a wave and the promise of its glide are formed by what goes on underwater or actually within water, and this process echoes the internal tremors of my own emotional disruptions. As Virginia Woolf reminds us, “Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon to her seemed limitless.” Perhaps it is as Woolf suggests: we must plumb life’s unfathomable depths in order to surface – now and again we rise…
I have come to believe that deep grief unmakes us, and that mourning is as much about grieving our lost love as it is about being forced to reimagine ourselves from the inside out even as we are submerged by longing. In paddling out each stroke moves me toward the horizon. My body tenses as I grab the rails of my board and push it under an oncoming wave only to be borne up through the surge of water at the back. I emerge just in time to paddle a little farther out before the next wave comes. Surfing, grieving, writing – these gestures swim in the fluid medium of the ocean and converge in the rhythmic poetry of the waves - this is my mourning surf.
My husband was not a surfer, but he loved watching it. He knew how much I loved surfing, so he had gamely taken over morning childcare to allow me to surf on the weekends. When my surfer friends suggested a paddle-out for Jim I was touched by their desire to support me. According to Patrick Moser, editor of Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing, surfers adapted the Hawaiian Beachboy tradition of a sea ceremony in which family and friends gathered out in the water in canoes, told stories, and scattered the ashes into the ocean. The modern-day practice of the paddle-out is very much a fluid and adaptable tradition that also follows certain structural patterns and conventions. The acts of paddling out, forming the circle, throwing flowers (instead of ashes), slapping and splashing the water and calling out a name are all highly ritualized actions. The photographs I’ve seen of paddle-outs, from underwater and from above, underscore the beauty of the ritual: seen from above, the boards fan out as if each one were a tiny colored petal belonging to some giant ocean flower. From below, images show the undersides of the boards forming a dark retinal disc surrounding a circle of light. The paddle-out ceremony acknowledges the pull of the undertow, the submission to the sea, and yet also, somehow, through participation in this seascape choreography of mourning, grief is transfigured.
Photo: Theresa Hoey
On the day of Jim’s paddle-out, there was a bit of a swell and a festive atmosphere on the beach. I arrived nervous with anticipation. Friends were waiting for me with bouquets of flowers in their arms, ready to get in the water. I told my daughter to watch the ceremony from the beach and left her with a trusted friend. I grabbed my board and placed a bunch of flowers on the nose. What a beautiful sight already to see twenty plus surfers hit the water with flowers on their boards, in their teeth, tucked into their suits, spilling out from their caps. A few flowers eluded our efforts to hold on to them as we ducked under the whitewater and paddled out beyond the breaking waves.
As I paddled out more people joined in and started to form a big circle. “This is really happening,” I thought to myself – it had been only a few weeks since Jim had died and I was still in shock and disbelief that he would not be waiting for me on shore with our daughter. Some surfers nodded to me as I passed them – acknowledging my sadness but also letting me know they had surfing to do and would not be joining in. It seemed that everyone was aware of what was going on and the morning took on a serious tone, even though the surf was quite good that day. As people gathered around me they reached out to join hands, a difficult enough task in the bumpy water. Friends started to speak about Jim, about our little family, and about how much they had missed seeing me in the water while I was caring for Jim in his final months. My tears started to flow as I spoke into the circle, “My darling Jim I love you! Stay with me!” As if to punctuate my cry of pain everyone started throwing their flowers into the ring and splashing towards the center as their voices rose to shout Jim’s name over and over and over. In the energy of that moment I couldn’t tell if we were summoning his spirit, calling him to us, or if we were releasing him somehow – maybe it was a little of both.
I caught a wave in, sparking a cheer from the line-up. Through a veil of ocean spray I saw my daughter in the distance gathering up the flowers, returned to her by the sea. As I walked towards her, my board under my arm, she ran to me excitedly, offering up big sandy, sea-drenched blossoms. Flowers for Flora. Jim and I had fallen in love over late night discussions of our favorite books and discovered we both admired Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. When it came time to name our daughter we knew we would name her Flora after the title character, and because the name was common to both our ancestries; Irish and Italian. As I saw her come toward me I realized that Jim had left me my very own little bud to nurture. Flora and I took the flowers home and pressed them into a book as a keepsake of the paddle-out. I remember her pulling out one of those grief books on the shelf that had been given to her about losing a parent. She had drawn and colored in the margins and on the last page of the book there was an outline where a picture of a blue ribbon had been detached. A blue ribbon for her lost daddy. She had cut it out and hung it in her room. One by one she took the flowers and pressed them into the pages, then she closed the book tightly and returned it to the bookshelf.
J’aime Morrison is a Professor of Movement at California State University Northridge and the artistic director of MourningSurf, offering virtual and in-person retreats and workshops in expressive movement for grief. Her recent short film, UPWELL, composes a visual intersection of body movements to translate her experience with grieving, illustrating the role of both dance and surfing in her journey.
In the film, a vision of surfing, embodied by surfer Kassia Meador, appears as in a dream and inspires a woman, Rachel Whiting, to return to the water after a devastating loss. Surrounded by a diverse group of women surfers, she paddles out and they perform a ritual of connection to each other and to the ocean that is a refuge for them all. The film, edited by Ethney McMahon, includes cinematography by Sarah Lee, Theresa Hoey and Lucia Griggi and features an original score by composer Karam Salem.
UPWELL was awarded Best Cinematography from the Los Angeles Experimental Dance and Music Film Festival and received an Award of Excellence from WRPN Women’s International Film Festival. Upcoming screenings include the Santa Barbara International Fine Art Film Festival and the California International Short Film Festival.