Finding the Edge
Before Daryl died, I read Cherly Strayed’s Wild and was explaining to him her quest on the Pacific Crest Trail after her mother’s death. “What will your quest be?” he asked. Without hesitation, I replied, “Go to a big wave surfing event.”
When I was a teenager, I fell in love with surfing. I don’t know where it came from. I grew up in lake-locked Michigan, nowhere near the ocean and I am also terrified of water. Maybe it was the skateboarding and California culture of the early ‘90s permeating the hallways of my junior high years, all the edgy skater boys wearing brands like Body Glove, Stüssy and Vans. Flipping through the pages of Surfer magazine, I was in awe of a human body balancing on the waves, the stunning images as they shot through a barrel of a wave or balanced on a mountain of water.
Over the years, I’ve watched a lot surfing documentaries, but it’s the ones about the extremes that speak to me. Like “Billy,” a short doc about Billy Kemper, a top big wave surfer who caught a wave in Morocco in 2020 that broke his pelvis and nearly ended his life and his career. Most recently, I watched “100 Foot Wave” which focused on top big wave surfer Garrett McNamara’s obsession with finding the ultimate wave and how it brought him pilgrim-like to Navare, Portugal.
"Fear is something we choose. Fear is when we're not in the moment. For the big wave, the only thing that exists is right now."
–Garrett McNamara, big wave surfer
Grief Lessons from Big Waves
Halfway through “100 Foot Wave,” I find myself in tears as McNamara skillfully maneuvers down a 78-foot wave, as if the water was land beneath his feet. In that moment, I realize the power of my loss and grief is as big as that wave. I survived cancer, it was terrifying, it took the love of my life, but grief and loss are a force of nature and the only way to survive it is to learn how to breathe, to get pummeled, to stay in the present and enjoy what it has left for you, not all it can take away. Watching surfing, I’ve found many metaphors for life after the death of a loved one:
Like chasing waves, grief and joy shift day-to-day, you will never catch the same feeling twice
Emotionally and mentally you must keep yourself in peak condition to survive
Fear cannot be present
Listening to an interview with James Nestor, the author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, he describes free divers, who go down hundreds of feet, far beyond what we think the human body can survive, and eventually, they find a “forced meditation” in the depth and darkness.
After Daryl’s diagnosis, we lived each moment to the fullest those last couple years, which is to say we were present. We didn’t skydive or travel the world, but we slowed our time together and cherished it, big and small moments. Even as the world shut down around us, we held on. I experienced several dark nights of the soul and, I came out the other side, washed up and gasping for breath, yes, but alive.
Throughout it all, my best friend, Kathleen said I had the calm of an astronaut or a Navy Seal. I never quite knew what she meant, until I saw it interpreted in physical form, these peak performance bodies throwing themselves into Mother Nature’s jaws and escaping. It’s the calm that you find only when you have gone deep into the abyss beyond fear.
“It’s not a terrible thing that we have fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
-Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Grief Lessons from a Big Rock
Not long after he died, I watched “Free Solo” about free climber Alex Honnold intent on doing a climb of El Capitan in Yosemite. (El Capitan, for those who don’t know, is 3,000 feet of granite). As I watched and heard him describe the experience, how he came to climbing, I began to understand something: He did not fear death more than he feared doing something he loved. It was simple and yet, complex.
When Daryl was first diagnosed I had this vision of him pinned between a boulder and a wall of rock, to move him would mean certain death. That vision then expanded as he went through chemotherapy and surgeries to the sense of living on the edge of a cliff. There is a strange reduction and expansiveness that occurs after a stage 4 cancer diagnosis. We had to be careful, thoughtful with every minute, our life together a silent meditation and belief that each minute carried years.
I think that’s what these climbers must do, just go one small step, a toe or finger grip, and then another. Knowing they may die, but embracing it as part of the living, as part of the sport. And doing it alone. The beauty of the moment captured when life and death are locked into one a terrifying, consuming, sublime experience.
Later, I read an article in the New Yorker about survivor’s guilt for many climbers, how many they have lost, the wildness of what they are trying to accomplish. They are a different type of human, creeping along the narrowest of paths, slowly, methodically, until there is no certain step. What I can see in these extreme surfers and climbers is they understand to eradicate fear, you must accept death. That’s the edge.
“Each day, there is a chance you might die. And there's nothing wrong with that. Every living being on Earth is facing
that same existential rift.”
—Alex Honnold, rock climber
While I could never go there physically, I can go their emotionally. I understand what they are searching for, why they do it in a way I never was able to before cancer. Because living is dying. There is no shape to a safe life, really. Because living is risk. I know I’ll survive grief. I’ll live with it, will merge with it.
A Whirlpool of Love and Grief
The end of Daryl’s life, that last week when he was home for hospice, felt like a tsunami. We could see it coming, but could not gauge how hard it would hit, what all it would take away, if we would survive, how long we could stay underwater. We tried what we could and we knew when to stop, and we let death in when it came. But now I feel like the depth of emotion, the edge cut so deep in me, it’s like a whirlpool of love and grief. Sometimes, I only want to be around those who understand the razor thin edge we walk every day between joy and death.
I used to be afraid of the dark as a child, even the shadows cast on the wall from the nightlight terrified me, my imagination always in overdrive. Now I sleep in the dark, in the bedroom where he died and all I feel is love and sadness. I don’t feel fear and I don’t care if I die. Let me rephrase: I care if I die and for those who will miss me, I just don’t fear it. It’s darkness and from there you leap.
“What we’re talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye—not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, talking, and thinking. The truth is that when we really begin to do this, we’re going to be continually humbled. There’s not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further. The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die,
the courage to die continually.”
—Pema Chodron