By Sarah E. Murphy

It’s been two years since I swam in the ocean. Three since I swam at my childhood beach, Falmouth Heights. It’s foreign to even type those words.

Swimming is one of the things that once made me feel like me, and the ocean played an integral role in the life I lived before my mother died and my husband was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

I’m salt-blooded. A Celtic Pisces. It’s part of my DNA and my astrological sign.

Jesus didn’t die for my sins; it was my Irish ancestors who made the ultimate sacrifice, forsaking their beloved shores so I could have the life they were denied. I never took that for granted.

If grief is a wave, anticipatory grief is a rip current that silently and swiftly takes you from all that is familiar, until you’re just barely out of reach. If you follow the instinct to fight it by swimming against the current, it will overpower you.

Or maybe it’s the opposite, and you’re the one stuck on dry land.

For the past few summers, I stood by helplessly as dementia took my mother from us, knowing she couldn’t be saved, watching and feeling myself drifting away with her.

The hose was dry in July. Lights on and windows closed in the afternoon. Silence in the garden and the once gurgling pond my husband Chris installed at her request.

Cars speeding by. Life carrying on beyond the thirsty tiger lilies.

I’ve often read – and I learned as a reporter when writing stories about mental health – that a sign of depression is when you no longer derive joy from things you once loved.

The few times I was able to bring myself to drive around the Heights hill in recent summers, I felt an actual ache in my heart, my soul, my bones, watching families making memories, while everything around me was changing, and mine were falling through my grasp, or perhaps worse, feeling like they never even happened at all.

In the years since I’ve experienced profound grief, I’ve found solace in solitude at the last jetty at Bristol, staring over Falmouth Heights, the place that helped shape me.

In the summer of 2015, when my father was dying, my mother, sister, and I occasionally sought comfort from late afternoon swims when time allowed, after fighting bridge traffic from Brigham and Women’s Hospital back to Falmouth.

I was able to capture a photo of my mom on one of those occasions as a large sailboat floated by against the backdrop of Vineyard Sound. I remember admiring and marveling at her strength.

Now I’m the one whose husband is in a hospital bed and once again, I call upon her example. I pray to my parents that this will be the summer I return to myself.