Transcriber: Naga Lakshmi Ganti Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I was seated at the kitchen table
across from the admiral of the United States Coast Guard,
as he uttered words that no parent could possibly prepare themselves to hear.
“Tomorrow, we’ll be holding a press conference to publicly announce
that the search is being called off. I’m so sorry,” he said.
After hearing those words,
I sat paralyzed in my chair and I thought,
“My son, my only child isn’t coming home? I’m never going to recover from this.”
And while I outwardly did my best to keep it together in public,
inside, I was devastated.
I became fearful of getting overwhelmed or appearing out of control,
so I buried the pain and I tried to carry on as normal.
At one point, having no idea what I'm supposed to do,
I actually googled how to grieve,
and the well-known model referred to as “the five stages of grief,”
has dominated searches around this topic for decades.
In case you’re unfamiliar,
the model suggests that grief begins at denial and ends at acceptance,
and almost immediately, I felt a sense of pressure,
like I was doing something wrong
because I didn’t experience grief like this.
I was surprised to eventually come to learn that the stages model
was originally introduced in the late 60s
and that it was actually developed for terminally ill cancer patients
to process their own grief.
And although they’ve been applied this way for as long as I can remember,
the stages model was never intended for the bereaved.
My idea is called the “grief continuum,”
and it suggests that navigating grief isn’t like navigating school,
that we don’t all start at the same place,
graduate through the same stages
to eventually arrive at the same destination.
Rather, that grief would be more accurately represented
on a bi-directional continuum with acceptance in the center.
And when tragedy arises,
we’d land on the continuum somewhere below acceptance,
and perhaps for some, their first experience is one of denial or anger,
bargaining or depression.
After first learning that my 14-year-old son
and his close friend were last seen leaving the Jupiter Inlet
on a 19-foot fishing boat
and that the Coast Guard was actively searching for them,
my first experience wasn’t any of these -
it was fear and a crippling sense of helplessness.
I mean if the boys were lost in a field somewhere,
at least I could go to where they were and walk a grid pattern
day and night until I found them.
But this was the Atlantic Ocean.
That search lasted seven excruciating days,
all while played out on national news and social media.
It actually turned out to be one of the most extensive searches
in the history of the Coast Guard, but neither of the boys were ever found,
and exactly what happened at sea that day still remains unclear.
The period that followed was indescribably painful -
thoughts like:
“I’m not a father anymore? You couldn’t even protect your own son.”
And just all the what-ifs led me to stages like worthlessness and guilt
and shame and sometimes even revenge.
And while I eventually did arrive at acceptance,
my journey there was anything but linear or even forward.
In fact, I’d approached acceptance innumerous times
and each time finding a new reason to fall back into despair.
Like even years later, after the incident,
I found myself worried that I might be judged
for posting a picture of myself on social media.
And it made me wonder,
is there a certain amount of time that needs to pass before it
would be considered socially acceptable for me to be seen smiling again?
And then one moment changed everything,
and suddenly I felt something that I hadn’t experienced
in a really long time.
Just on the other side of acceptance, I found subtle optimism,
just a small sign that let me know
that I might just actually recover from this.
And that led me to curiosity and eventually courage and forgiveness,
and now a sense of purpose that I’d never imagined.
So is it possible that somwhere
on the other side of acceptance,
grief holds gifts?
It is possible, and I know that because I’ve experienced it
and so have countless others.
But the point I want you to take away here
is that even if you’ve reached acceptance and found gifts beyond,
at any point in time,
we could easily hear a song that reminds us of the one that we love
and find ourselves in tears,
and if we do, it doesn’t mean we’re grieving wrong
because there is no one-size-fits-all model for grief.
What I want you to take away,
and what I’m trying to illustrate here is that grief doesn’t always
start at denial or end at acceptance,
and because it doesn’t, I believe the journey should accurately reflect it.
OK Phil, what was the moment that changed everything?
I mean, what did you actually do to surpass acceptance?
That moment occurred during one of the many times
that I found myself on the floor, curled up in a ball, missing my son,
except for this time, I saw him quite vividly,
and he looked at me and said,
“Get up, dad, it’s OK.
I’ll see you when you get here.”
And in that moment,
I realized that whatever feeling we may be searching for in grief,
for me, it was just the sense to know that life would be OK again.
Now you might call that healing or acceptance or peace,
but whatever it is,
that feeling is you’re searching for inside, it’s already inside you.
Because what Perry’s words really showed me
is that sometimes we just need to give ourselves permission to feel it.
And I think that this whole notion of giving myself permission
eluded me for so long is because culturally as men,
well, we’re basically brainwashed to believe ...
real men don’t cry or share emotion or seek therapy.
We’re supposed to just suck it up and tough it out.
But that strategy doesn’t work with grief
because we can never outrun the reminders
or outflank the memories,
and you can’t deny or insulate yourself from the pain.
The only way that I was able to truly begin to heal from that pain
was to truly begin to feel the pain, to stop running from it,
to acknowledge it, and sometimes to even sit in it.
And then over time,
I became open to the memories and connected to the reminders.
And if I’m being honest,
I used to believe that I needed someone or something else to help me heal,
my therapist, an authority figure, to give me permission.
But now I believe one of the greatest acts of self-love we can offer
is being our own caregiver.
And you might think this is silly,
but one of the ways that I used to do that was with Post-it notes,
and I’d place them in places where I could see them every day.
I called these my permission slips.
Giving myself permission was the catalyst to me getting up
and taking that first step and then the next,
and slowly I watched the pieces of my life come back together.
And while I do realize that our experiences with grief,
yours and mine, are different, eventually, like my son Perry,
I bet your loved one would tell you to get up, too.
So sometimes our grief can really be part of how we choose to honor and respect
the ones we love, despite their physical absence.
My hope for all this
is that the next time someone finds themselves
in their own search for acceptance and googles how to grieve,
that they discover the grief continuum
and realize that grief can’t always be confined to five stages,
and that regardless of where we land, our journeys to acceptance
aren’t always going to be the same,
and that when we finally do arrive at the threshold of acceptance,
what will ultimately determine whether we keep falling back
into a life of utter despair
or whether we can push forward into a life of purpose and passion
are the methods that we choose to integrate grief into our lives.
It’s been six years and five months
since that admiral told me the search was coming to an end,
and when I relive that moment now, I often picture myself saying,
“No sir, your search may end tomorrow,
but mine, my search -
it’s just getting started.”
Thank you.
(Applause)