I’ve been told grief is like a spiral. The process involves the same hurts over and over again with lessening intensities.

I’ve been told grief is like waves, with some being crashing breakers, others tiny wavelets, and still others the raging fury of a tsunami.

What I’ve come to think is this…grief is like the Panama Canal.

Hear me out. So, my dad filmed time lapses and standard video of the locks the boats would go through whenever he and my mom went on river cruise and when they went through the Panama Canal. And I started thinking of how grief is a passage (brought to you by the thought of the day on April 30).

Grief is a passage, a canal, that takes us from the ‘ocean’ of the old normal to the ocean of the new normal. It takes a while to get through and sometimes you have to sit in one spot for a while as things are prepared for the next step, the next lock. But you don’t ever stay. There are no hotels in the canal, no homes to buy or cushy spots to live. Eventually, you will get through it and you’ll find yourself on the ocean again, a new ocean, as beautiful as the old, but different. You just need to stay on your boat until you’re all the way through.

And I found that mental image very helpful.