Learning to Ride the Waves

You’ve got to love a SoCal doctor’s waiting room.

Not long after Wendy passed away, a person with good intentions told me there would be five stages of grief to walk through. As a very structured Virgo personality who never felt such profound loss, the idea of a timeline was comforting. It gave me something to hold onto.

Like when I broke my leg — give it 10 weeks, and the pain will be gone.

Or so I thought.

To help things along, I threw myself into “doing grief right.” I read anything I could get my hands on. When I did, I felt misled by the popular understanding of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. She famously developed the five stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) and many people reference her book, “On Death and Dying.” It was groundbreaking research.

But there’s an important nuance: her research was based on interviews with people facing their own deaths.

Not those left behind.

That distinction matters, especially for anyone new to grief who expects it to follow a neat progression from point A to point B, ending in — Ta-da! — healing. Kübler-Ross herself acknowledged she didn’t intend the stages to be a universal roadmap for bereavement.

Over time, and especially after her later work and collaborations (like with David Kessler), they became widely applied that way.

I first encountered the metaphor that “grief comes in waves” in Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

One day during a doctor’s office visit, the waiting room monitor played an endless loop of surfers. This not only validated my Midwestern stereotype about Southern California life but also made me think deeply (I had a full hour in that waiting room) about the constant and forever ebb and flow of an ocean of grief.

In Meghan Riordan Jarvis’ “End of the Hour: A Therapist’s Memoir,” she reminds that grief isn’t an illness with a cure. It’s an adaptation process. Loss changes you permanently and the goal should not be resolution. It’s integration. Further, she states that the timeline myth “creates harm because people start to believe they’re doing grief ‘wrong’ when it inevitably resurfaces.”

Oh yes, like a wave sneaking up on you. Yep. Got it.

I have come to understand that the expectation of “getting over it” creates secondary suffering. As a therapist recently presented: “Why suffer twice?”

Author Shelby Forsythia challenges what she calls the “grief expiration date.” Her core message is blunt: grief doesn’t end—it evolves. In her book, “Grief Your Way,” she mentions, “You can’t forecast your way out of grief, because there’s no way to determine when the next wave is coming.”

She points out that the pressure to be “done” with grief often comes from cultural discomfort, not psychological reality. People aren’t trying to rush grievers because it’s healthy—they’re trying to restore their own sense of normalcy. 

Forsythia argues that while “waves” can be helpful, it can also imply there are calm periods where grief is “gone.” But the reason the metaphor persists is because (when it’s used well) it communicates something essential: You don’t move past grief. You learn how to stay afloat when it returns.

Staring at surfers on who study the swells and rise to meet them (all in slo-mo video, I might add), I started to see it differently. The waves weren’t the problem. The challenge was learning how to navigate them.

In “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss,” Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor points out that grief never ends. It is something that recurs over and over again.

Wave after wave.

Forever coming in. Forever going out.

Sometimes gentle. Sometimes slamming.

O’Connor writes, “You will experience pangs of grief over this specific person forever. You will have discrete moments that overwhelm you, even years after the death when you have restored your life to a meaningful, fulfilling experience.”

Wendy often signed cards, “Your forever wife.” She is part of my life in the same way the sky is always above me, and the ocean never stops reaching the shore.

When I talk with others who are grieving, I often come back to the idea of holding two truths at once. Just as joy and sadness can coexist, love and loss are intertwined.

The waves can be brutal. And they can also teach you something.

Over time, you don’t stop the ocean.
But you can learn to ride it.