I Am Still Afraid of Water

Grief lives in the body.

We talk about grief like it's something that happens in the mind — stages, thoughts, memories. But grief is also physical. It settles into your muscles, your nervous system, the catch in your chest when a song comes on unexpectedly. It shows up at the ocean when you didn't expect it to.

I know this because I am still afraid of water.

My dad died in a boating accident on Father's Day weekend in 2003. We were on the Oregon coast — the kind of place that should feel like peace. It didn't after that. It never quite has.

The year after his accident, I took my kids back to the Oregon coast. I wanted to give them the ocean. I wanted to pretend that water could just be water again.

I remember standing near the docks and the bridges, loud and scared every time my kids got too close to the edge. I was trying to hold it together and failing. The fear wasn't rational — I knew that — but the body doesn't negotiate with rational. The body just remembers.

Here's what I've learned about the grief that lives in your body:

It doesn't mean you're broken. It means you loved someone.

That fear? That's just love with nowhere to go. It found a home in the sound of water, the sight of a dock, the particular quality of light on the Oregon coast on a summer afternoon. Grief attaches itself to the sensory — because grief happened in a moment that was sensory. A smell, a sound, a place.

And healing doesn't mean the fear disappears. Sometimes it means learning to go to the ocean anyway.

I still feel anxiety when I'm completely alone. That's my body's grief language — the one it learned in 2003 when I realized the person who knew me completely was gone, and no one was coming to sit with me. My nervous system learned to brace.

I'm still working on it. Every day.

"I'm healing, just like you."

I say that to my clients and I mean every word of it. I'm not someone who walked through grief and came out the other side untouched. I carry it. The fear of water. The anxiety of aloneness. The weight of all those phone calls that will never come.

But I also carry something else: the knowledge that I kept going anyway. That the Lord didn't waste a single moment of that pain. That the woman I am today was formed in the crucible of all that loss.

And I believe the same is true for you.

Your grief is not evidence that you're stuck. Your fear is not evidence that you're weak. You are a person who loved someone — maybe many someones — and that love left a mark.

The question isn't whether you'll heal perfectly. The question is whether you'll keep showing up for yourself.

I'm here to help you do exactly that.

Elizabeth Nelson is a Grief & Identity Coach. She knows the fear that lives in the body — because she's still healing too. Join the free 7 Days of Hope series at elizabethnelsonco.com.