Illustration by Alex Chen
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They say grief comes in waves.
I used to think that meant grief was something manageable. Predictable, even. Something that would come and go in tidy sets, with enough space to catch my breath in between.
When my mom was first diagnosed with cancer, the waves were there, but far off. I could see them gathering on the horizon, darkening the water, but I still believed I might find a way to stand firm. We had a plan, after all – treatment options, consults, the quiet hope that this tumour, strange and unwelcome as it was, could be cut out or shrunk down. Something we could handle.
Then came the scans. One after another, each one taking a little more air from the room. Inoperable. The word landed like a stone in my chest. And then, a week before her 62nd birthday, the tide shifted entirely: metastasis to her bones. Six months or less.
Now, the waves are crashing. There is no rhythm to them. No pause to breathe. One moment I’m making dinner for my kids, answering an email, picking up dog toys from the floor and the next I’m underwater – salt in my throat, panic in my chest. I resurface gasping, just in time to see the next swell rising.
I’ve learned that anticipatory grief isn’t polite. It doesn’t wait for death to arrive. It charges in early, tearing at you while your person is still right there, warm and alive. You grieve the future while trying to stay anchored in the present. You wonder how to hold someone tighter when you know your arms will never be strong enough to keep them here.
Mom’s Just Busy Living tour helped with the in-between time, one foot in joy, one in grief
My mom has always loved the water. She grew up swimming in lakes, diving into ocean waves, floating on her back with the sun on her face. Water has always been her place of solace. When I was a kid, she’d take me swimming and tell me to let the water hold me, to relax every muscle and “fill my tummy with air” so I could float. It felt like magic then. It still does now.
Maybe that’s why, in these days when grief comes hard and fast, I find myself drawn back to water. To the pool, to the lake, to the ocean if I can get there. When I swim, everything goes quiet. My thoughts slow. My body remembers what it means to be held.
Sometimes I imagine her there beside me, doing her steady breaststroke, her face lifting from the water every few seconds, hair slicked back, eyes bright. I think about how, even as cancer spreads through her body, she still wants to swim. She still wants to feel that weightlessness, that freedom from pain, if only for a short time.
These waves of grief carry pieces of her. The way she hums Taylor Swift when she cooks. The smell of her hair when she hugs me. The handwritten sticky notes she tucks on leftovers she sends home with me. They wash ashore uninvited, leaving me to gather them up like driftwood: beautiful, broken, impossible to hold for long.
I don’t know what the coming months will look like. I don’t know how many more swims she will get or how many times I will find myself pulled under by sorrow before the final wave arrives.
But when that wave comes, when it takes her beyond my reach, I will keep swimming. I will find her there, in the quiet and the dark and the light dancing above me. I will carry her love in every stroke, every breath, every moment of surrender to something bigger than myself. Because grief comes in waves. But so does love. I will keep reminding myself – just like she always has – that neither one has to pull me under, if I just remember to let go and let the water hold me.
Kelly Young lives in Kelowna, B.C.
This essay was written in the weeks after my mom’s cancer diagnosis. It captures an earlier chapter of our family’s experience and is being published after a more recent reflection on where that journey has taken us.