What the Ocean Gave Me

There are places to go when language runs out. When answers stop helping and silence feels more honest than explanation. After my diagnosis, after the surgeries, after the blur of medical decisions, I didn’t know what to do – so I went to the water. It’s ironic – that healing doesn’t necessarily start when you’re wheeled into recovery. Instead, it starts in strange places, like a shoreline full of salt and rot.

                                        

Most mornings after surgery, I went to the ocean. Not for clarity or transformation, but just to be somewhere that didn’t expect me to explain anything. The beach was quiet. Cool air, damp sand, sea foam stretching like lace across the shore. Calm. I walked because I needed to. My body was bruised and stitched and healing. Moving felt defiant, painful at times, and always grounding. Each step pulled at the seam of healing, a quiet reminder of what had been taken and what hadn’t fully yet come back. I walked along the beach as if I was relearning something, not just how to move, but how to live inside this changed body. My mind was a tangle of fear, numbness, gratitude, and something like survival-mode on autopilot. I wanted peace, and the beach always seems like a good place to find it. It’s been my safe space. My place for healing. 

But on those particular mornings, it felt less like a place of peace and more like a shoreline of ghosts.

The first day, it was a dead pelican. Still, wings and neck twisted awkwardly. I winced and stepped around it, half-spooked, half-sad, whispering something to the air, speaking out to the ocean and the sky. The next day, another pelican. Then a dolphin. A sea lion after that. A few mornings later, hundreds of velellas—those delicate blue sail creatures—strewn across the sand like a tide of shattered glass. I stared at them, those small sails, and wondered what it means to belong to something you can’t control. Was that what I was doing?

Then, a large, luminous jellyfish, the kind you’d expect to see in an aquarium, but this time, beached and still.

And finally, a whale. Enormous, decayed but whole. Vertebrae exposed. Jawbone open in a silent scream. Flesh, blubber, rot. The stench hit before the sight. I stood there, staring death in the face, unable to look away. People came and went; I stayed. Why? Maybe I needed to bear witness. Maybe I thought if I looked long enough, I’d understand something. Or maybe, I just didn’t want to turn my back on something that once lived.

All of this happened over just a few weeks. Day after day, walk after walk, death after death. I thought to myself, is this some kind of extended metaphor?  Do my cancer vibes extend to sea life now? Is my grief magnetic? Should I be banned from beaches for the sake of marine populations?

I came seeking healing and the ocean gave me loss – on repeat.

And still, I went back. Not because it was comforting, but because it was honest. Wild, messy, and absolutely uninterested in pretending everything’s fine. That’s what I needed — not a sanitized version of healing, but the raw kind. The kind that stinks. The kind that says look closer anyway.

I kept thinking about the velella. I’d never seen them before. Small, vibrant, jellyfish-adjacent — with little translucent sails that catch the wind and carry them wherever the current goes. The tide leaves them scattered and drying on the sand, hundreds at a time, their shimmer dimming by the minute. But when they’re alive, they don’t fight the ocean. They belong to it. They’re not surrendering. They’re surviving with it.

                          

It made me think about what it means to live with cancer. And Li-Fraumeni Syndrome — this rare, inherited mutation that means my cells don’t play by the rules and my family is now intimately familiar with MRIs, early screenings, and genetic counseling. I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t want to become a human encyclopedia of rare disorders or surgeries or risk percentages.

But here I am – still learning to ride the current. 

I think the velella taught me something. Not how to surrender, but how to move with the current I can’t control. To live in this fractured, wave-tossed body with some small sail catching just enough wind to keep going. It’s not passive. It’s not giving up. It’s finding belonging in the life you didn’t choose and figuring out how to ride it anyway.

So yeah — I still go back to the beach. I still look for quiet. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I find something rotting on the shore. It gives me a place to walk. Somewhere my body can ache without anyone needing me to say why.

The ocean doesn’t promise comfort. But it promises truth. And I’m learning that truth, even when hard, is exactly the kind of tide that carries you forward. And sometimes, if you’re paying attention, it carries you towards something beautiful.