Drowning and the five stages of grief.

Lately I worry that I have the capacity to watch myself drown. I think that most people have that capacity. It’s not that I want to drown or die in any way but that under extreme duress, it’s human nature to accept dying and die. Stories told by my instructor at the Wilderness Survival courses and an account from the local Juneau newspaper suggest that maybe all humans have the capacity to yearn to die under the wrong circumstances. I also wonder about how we react to life and death situations can be a mirror to how we live everyday life.

My wilderness survival instructor told of a man doing a roped crossing of a ravine in the Sierra Nevada. He had clipped into a rope stretched over a ravine and miscalculated the angle of the rope. Due to sag in the rope from his weight, he stopped four feet from the far wall and hung there for two days. He fought to live the whole time. When rescuers arrived, he collapsed and soon died. When he was alone, he was solely responsible for his survival but once the rescuers arrived, he gave up both mentally and physically. We don’t know what was going on in his mind because he didn’t live to tell.

The Juneau Empire carried a story a few years back written by a man that survived a boat accident. This time the guy lived but not by his own choice. This man was at sea and capsized his boat. He tried to climb on top the capsized boat but the boat kept moving. Within minutes, the boat sank and in a very short time he went through all five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. His reckoning of time was off kilter. He said that at times he felt like he was in the water for many hours and other times it felt like minutes. In reality he could not have been in the water for more than 30 minutes. People die of hypothermia in Alaskan waters quickly even on warm summer days. He was only saved by his life jacket and another fishing boat. That’s the part of his story that intrigues me. That and he was a good writer who articulated with humility all that he thought. I tried to find the story with an internet search but couldn't.

Lynn Canal near Juneau with flat seas. 

When presented with a throw-rope, he didn’t want to grab it. He told the other fisherman that he couldn’t grab it even though he could. People can become so cold that their muscles no longer function but that wasn’t his situation. With some coaxing, he finally grabbed the rope. Just minutes earlier he was fighting like a mad cat to climb on top of his sinking skiff but once he resigned himself to death, he didn’t want to fight even with rescue right in front of him.

The five stages of grief are probably an evolutionary benefit. The stages of grief apply to anything in our lives that involve major loss, whether it's a terminal illness, the loss of a loved one, the loss of something philosophically important to you, or the impending loss of your own life or health.  The time frames for going through the five stages can be minutes to years, depending upon the nature of the potential loss. Facing a serious accident, the five stages of grief can happen quickly.  Nothing as universal as this type of behavior comes about by accident. Each stage allows us to cope with a loss situation and that can be comforting at the point of dying. At the genetic level, we are Stone Age monkeys evolved over millions of years in Stone Age conditions. Humans lived in caves for millions of years longer than we have lived in houses and our loves, hates, fears, and dreams reflect that. We cling to our loves ones like our tribe is the only thing standing between us and a sabre toothed tiger. 

During the denial phase, you actually do know that death is possible and likely. They wouldn’t call it denial if there were nothing to deny.  Maybe humans are prone to denial because evolutionarily, denial impairs the tendency to panic. Anger can have a similar evolutionary benefit. Imagine a Stone Age hunter facing a sabre toothed tiger. Panic could kill him. Anger might save his life.  Bargaining can also help the hunter and I am not talking about bargaining with a sabre toothed tiger. Bargaining with god, a goddess, a sacred ancestor, or some other deity can give the person under stress the chance to see a path forward. Depression and acceptance are evolutionarily beneficial because statistically speaking we are rarely lucky enough to have a throw rope and things end badly. Depression and acceptance don’t come around until things gets really bad but they are beneficial evolutionarily to those witnessing the horrible events. If I accept my demise after all I have done, my children might benefit and they carry my genes.  However, in a situation where a "throw rope" comes along, acceptance can turn against us.

Modern life may have made rescue more likely in dire situations, turning evolution's asset into a liability.

It took the Juneau man in a capsized skiff about twenty minutes to go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  Upon seeing rescue his head needed about twenty minutes to reverse the process and accept that he wasn’t going to die that day. After it was all over, he recognized that he was being irrational but he did not recognize irrationality at the time and that is important. Survival sometimes requires making rational decisions “in the moment” and by definition we can’t recognize irrationality in ourselves until after the fact, if ever. If we can see that we are irrational clearly, we aren’t irrational.

Big River Beach, the sea cave is on the far left of the photo and hard to see. 

Big River enters the sea on the right of photo, behind the rocks.

Search and Rescue personnel see this behavior a lot. People get sketched out, at first they fight to survive, but some will eventually fight to die. I don’t know what I would do because I haven’t reached been in a situation where all options seemed gone. I have been close, however.

Several years ago I was surfing in my kayak near Mendocino, California. It’s a fair distance north of San Francisco.  I made some dumb mistakes and I should not have been out there at all. I was alone in a place I wasn’t familiar with. I didn’t take the time to notice important aspects of my surrounding. I didn’t pay attention to the rip current coming off Big River Beach where I was surfing. Big River, the namesake of the beach, was in flood stage from recent rains so the rip current was strong. I didn’t check the marine report to find that swells were in excess of 15 feet and small craft advisories in effect and I didn’t notice a northward drift.  The waves crashing into the cliffs to the north of my beach didn’t concern me because I didn’t realize I was going to be pulled toward them if I had to swim to shore. I went out and caught a wave and thought I was fine because I was a good kayaker and had a good wet suit and a life jacket. Any one of these mistakes would rarely cause a problem by itself but all the mistakes in concert caused a stereo of misfortune. For example, a rip current isn't a huge deal taken solo. Sure, a rip current can carry you out to sea if you try to swim against it but if you swim perpendicular to it, you exit the rip current and can swim to shore. Often there is a complimentary current carrying you toward shore.  In my case the complimentary current carried me toward but shore was a cliff and larege waves were crashing into it with intense force. The life jacket and wetsuit saved my life.

Waves come in sets. Often, there will be six to eight smaller waves followed by six to eight larger waves. So it goes. I went out during the small set but thinking I was in the large set. The waves were six to eight feet tall and that seemed like the large set to me. I caught a wave about seven feet tall and it was a wild ride but I rode it, though not with finesse.   When the large set arrived they were 12-15 feet tall and I sit 18 inches tall in my kayak. When the wave hit I felt like a rag in a washing machine. I was out of my kayak and soon the kayak itself floated away. I swam toward the beach only to notice that I was not going to get to the sandy beach because the current was drifting to the north and into the cliffs at Mendocino. I swam as hard as I could but I worried. I went through the denial phase thinking this was much like other dumps and swims I have made but deep down I knew otherwise. I was unwillingly body surfing toward a cliff, not a sandy beach. The person in denial puts the thought on a on a shelf. The thoughts of doom are still real but suppressed.  I was in a bad situation and I definitely reached the anger phase and the bargaining phase. The anger was at myself.  After about forty minutes of fighting against the rip tide, I had drifted north enough to escape the rip tide and swim to shore but the shore was a cliff north of my beach. I noted a large cave in the cliff and body surfed into the cave. The back end of the cave was out of the water. 

Big River Cave, (from the internet) I haven't been back and didn't have a camera. This photo is low tide. At high tide most of the cave is full of water and you can't tell that you could walk out at low tide.

I lay on the ground at the back of the cave and figured I had never been more exhausted and very glad to be alive. To this day, I still have never been more exhausted. I was in a dead-end cave with the ocean smashing into the entrance.  Yet, I was on land and breathing.  I didn’t have a plan beyond regaining my composure and then looking for a way out of the cave. When I finally gathered my strength a guy from the Coast Guard dropped from the sky. Literally! Somebody saw me bobbing around in the water, called the Coast Guard, and one of them rappelled off the cliff from above and into my cave. The Coast Guard pulled me up the rope and out of the cave and I was fine. I made the news in Mendocino, California.  The Coasty was about five minutes late pulling me out of the water because I was already safe but it was VERY nice to see him. I was safe in the cave but I had not thought of an exit strategy. You can walk out of this cave on sand at low tide but I didn’t know that at the time. I should go back and visit the scene some time and sit in that cave. Later in the day, I recovered my kayak where it washed up on a beach about half a mile north. I still own that kayak.

My kayak in Lynn Canal, Alaska

I never went through the last of the five stages of grief. I went through denial, anger, and did a fair amount of bargaining, but never experienced depression or acceptance.  I started to bargain with God and just felt silly. I quit swimming numerous times and I bargained with myself, making agreements that I might live if I fought harder. I remember thinking, “This is a such beautiful place to die,” and then thinking, “But you can’t fucking die today.” I promised myself that I wasn’t going to waste my days caring about material things and not because I felt the promise would help me to shore but because at that moment it was crystal clear that measuring human value by the metric of possessions is a bullshit metric. The person with the most toys is not the winner. The human race is doomed by our glorification of possessions. I didn’t keep all these promises because I still sometimes lose sight of what is most important. One thinks about a lot of things in a very short period of time during a bargaining phase even if it only lasts twenty minutes.  I prayed to my own Gods. Visions of my wife and children spurred me to keep swimming and that kept me going but eventually you run out of physical strength.

Bargaining is a stage that only carries people so far. I believe now that I was just luckier than the people that finish the five stages of grief and finally accept death. The guy that capsized his skiff near Juneau accepted his own death because he didn’t have a cave to swim to like I did. Juneau is a beautiful place to die. The fact that I never completed the five stages of grief leads me to wonder how would react if I were the guy from the capsized skiff near Juneau that accepted his own death and had to be coaxed to accept his own rescue. I am not sure I would be different. Who among us is immune to human nature?

Somewhere along the Mendocino Coast, 2008. 

Different trip

Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  We don’t have to be in dire situations to pass through the stages of grief. I meet too many people that once had hopes and dreams and now they go to work and go home and watch TV and occasionally drink themselves into a stupor. I know other people that have quit going to work and just sit home and watch TV.  Grief provides a dark twist on the speech by Apostle Paul from Corinthians. “"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." Why the hell would anyone want to put away childish things? Childish things Saint Paul, are some of the best things.  Too many people come to accept that life is functionally over before they even know what it means to live. They have accepted that life is dull and useless but safer and easier if lived vicariously, mostly on television but sometimes through drugs, alcohol and/or cultish behavior. The person with the most toys, wins.  Perhaps they have accepted the final phase of grief already. It’s difficult to get people to grab the throw-rope and make the move necessary to live.

Mendocino Coast, 2008

In most day to day life it’s difficult to know where you are in the rescue scenario. Am I the guy in the water who is refusing to grab the throw-rope or am I the guy trying to save the sap that won’t help save himself? I am not quite sure. 

Mendocino Coast

Your dreams might be different.