Drowning in Reverse

It was early in the morning and sunny, and I was on a fishing boat. A storm hovered on the horizon, but at that moment, the water around me was calm.

I turned at the sound of a splash to see a giant black tentacle burst out of the water. It whipped toward me and snaked its way around my ankle. Jerked off my feet, I slammed onto the deck and started sliding toward the open back of the boat.

I didn’t know it at the time, but as soon as I slammed onto the deck, the life I was living was over. I would never get it back.

As I slid toward the back of the boat, I watched the tentacle disappear over the edge, dragging me with it. I kicked at the tentacle with my free leg, and grasped at anything I could see. But I grabbed nothing.

“No, no, no, no, no,” I said as I slid toward the water.

I splashed into the ocean, and the tentacle tightened its grip as we rocketed toward the bottom. The water got darker and darker, the surface further and further, access to air impossible. Once on the bottom, I floated next to a gigantic, dark shape, its tentacle still holding me prisoner.

That calm moment on the surface was a distant memory. I wouldn’t see light again for years.

The dark monster that dragged me into the abyss—ripping me out of one life and into another—was the suicide of my oldest son. He was 18.

I’ve started my story this way because I often described my grief as “drowning in reverse”.

When I heard the news, my mind scrambled to grasp on to some other reality. It was such a horrible thought—that inky black tentacle dragging me down—that I immediately starting grasping at other ways that would explain it. Anything but the truth. Maybe it was a mistaken identity. Maybe he was playing a cruel joke on us. Maybe anything, anything but what it was.

But then, once I got home, I was in the water and sinking, sinking, sinking. And I didn’t stop until I hit the bottom; a dark, indifferent world, immersed in death and grief and horror. It was everywhere all at once. The sorrow and shock of his death were all-consuming, inescapable, and debilitating.

It was like that 24 hours a day.

Then weeks later, for a few hours, I could breathe again.

We were having a patio built. One morning, I looked outside the kitchen window and noticed that the seams between the bricks didn’t line up with the outside edges. The contractor had started laying bricks without first ensuring that the seams were square with the space. And they were so indifferent to their sloppy work that they had started cutting bricks on an angle to fit into the last row.

“Hey…” I said on the phone. “I just noticed that the patio bricks aren’t square with the edges. They’ll have to be relaid.”

“Oh, it’s not a big deal,” he said. “After a while you won’t notice it.”

Fuck that. I’m one of those weirdos that doesn’t see the subject of a painting, but I’ll notice if it’s crooked. So having crooked bricks in a patio—especially right outside the kitchen window—was not an option. I would never not notice it, and “after a while” it would only drive me crazy.

I didn’t have the patience and energy to discuss it, so I hung up the phone, walked outside, and tore up all the bricks. Then for a few hours I played brick Tetris, relaying them and hiding the contractor’s sloppy work where I couldn’t square it. I left him drawings of each oddball brick that was left to be cut and a diagram of where it should be placed.

After weeks of overwhelming darkness, playing brick Tetris was the first time that I had a break. It was engaging just enough to push my son’s death backstage. It was still there, waiting in the wings, but I had a few hours without it. For a few hours, it felt like I could breathe again.

But then when I was finished, reality came rushing back. I was back in the ocean and sinking back to the bottom.

That’s how it went for the first two years.

Most of the time, I was drowning, far from light and air. Then something would catch my attention, and it would be distracting enough that I would resurface. For a few seconds, I wouldn’t think of my dead son. But then just as quickly, the moment would pass, and I’d sink back to the bottom. I always got dragged back down.

At first, resurfacing was rare and brief, but as time went on, I started to surface more frequently and for longer.

I was drowning in reverse.