I walk along the shore. The waves crash into each other from several sides and collide, creating chaos in the water where I stand. As nature often feels like a metaphor, this evening too, as I walk and ponder the theme, when did I let go and set free?

Very significant choices from my life are right there as perfect examples. They trip for speaking time as almost puppet-like exemplary data that when I have dared to let go of a truly true place and made life-changing choices with my heart, the rest follows and falls into place, so one has to wonder.

But something else insists inside tonight. A soft plea to use the opportunity to look at what is currently gnawing at the heart, where there is anything but release or a sense of choice. Since I haven't brought any writing materials to the beach anyway, I go with this insistence and let the words take shape as they will in the wind as I walk along the water's edge. At first the words come as questions. Soon more as stark statements – if you don't figure out how to let go, you'll lose 100%. No, even more, because the struggle doubles the suffering... The tears come.

I imagine a line of loved ones. They are still here. Or… They are getting smaller and smaller. Or thinner and thinner, a little more transparent each time I see them. Whether it is age or dementia, it does not change the panic I feel inside. An old familiar feeling of being abandoned – and the impulse to shout, to run after and not let the door close and leave me alone. But there is no door. I can’t call out to anyone.

Age and illness have always crept up on people, so why am I whining? My mind is not speaking so gently tonight, pointing out that losing is a condition.

The sky is magnificent with black cloud formations over the beach. The raindrops splash a little sporadically, and quite poetically they mix with the tears. I will remember a very specific expression that suddenly appeared in his eyes one day and gave me unease. It reminded me of the expression that gradually took over my Grandmother's eyes along with dementia many years ago. When I experience that look again, the sadness emerges. An old one and a new one.

How do I let go here?

I feel it. To let go here is to lose. It doesn't feel life-giving at all like setting free. More like opening myself up to loss. If I'm not going to fight against reality, but let go into what is, then... then it's a raw experience of loss. Loss of people I love.

When death takes a loved one away, there are rituals of mourning and farewell, of celebrating in gratitude all that was. In this kind of gradual, somewhat taboo loss, there are no rituals. Here there is confusion. Silence. For me, also avoidance. It makes me completely unhappy when I discover that because something has changed, I become insecure and withdraw from contact. But they are still here, in a way at least.

And the love in me is unchanged, I remind myself. The sorrow is here too, but because it disappears more gradually, imperceptibly like the sand that slowly runs through my fingers, it becomes so diffuse.

Letting go here is really one of those existential exercises I seem to find myself in again and again. Specifically in this situation, being with the person who is now. Letting go of the struggle for them to be as they were before. Opening myself up to the loss, to the grief and for the love that, regardless of the gaze, the transparency, and the loss of reciprocity, is still here.

To let go tonight is to walk with my feet in the water, to let the sound of the ocean ripple through me with my breath. To physically breathe through these facts that people of inestimable importance in every way in my life are now gradually slipping further and further away, like the wave retreating into the ocean.  

Yes. That's how it is. Tears. Let go.

Photo: Martin Guldberg and Dorte Lunderskov