On Saturday, I received a text from my sister-in-law, saying there had been a bad car accident involving people from my hometown, Walkerton.  This small-town community of 5,000 people had just marked the 25th anniversary of the Walkerton water crisis that had claimed lives and made many people ill over contaminated drinking water.

This car accident occurred on Friday, and it involved 4 teenage girls (two were 16 and two were 17) and their teacher/coach, who was driving the SUV home around 4:30 p.m. from a baseball tournament hosted in Dorchester, Ontario.

Today is my birthday! I am now 49 years of age.  You will never hear me complain about turning another year older.  Each year is a gift.  My husband, Jeff, died of esophageal cancer at the age of 46. I have gotten the gift of three extra years (and counting!) more than Jeff did on this Earth.

After my husband Jeff died in 2019, I felt such raw and agonizing grief. I grieved for my kids who were 8 and 10 years old when their Dad died after a 2-year battle with esophageal cancer. I grieved for myself. And, I grieved for Jeff because he didn’t get the chance to live out the life he so desperately wanted, to grow old with me and watch our daughters at the different stages of their lives.

Now that I have had the experience of intimately knowing grief, I don’t believe it is something we can move through. There is no end destination to get to here. Grief does not end. But, it changes.

“It comes in waves,” is often how I’ve heard grief described. For me, there have been many days when it has felt like a tsunami after losing both my Husband and Dad to cancer. I have envisioned myself as a surfer, clinging to my board in these conditions, just trying to survive.

So when I connected with Dan Fischer, an avid surfer, who has taken that notion quite literally with his One Last Wave Project that connects grief, honouring our passed loved ones, and surfing, my interest was peaked.