This Is My Sea: An exploration of grief and recovery

by Miriam Mulcahy

Over the course of seven difficult years Miriam Mulcahy lost her mother, father and sister, each grief threatening to drown her. But instead of going under she discovered the lessons of the sea, letting the water teach her how to get through anything in life: one breath builds on another, another stroke, another kick and you will get home.

THIS IS MY SEA takes our greatest fear, death, and wraps it up in language so fine and beautiful that the reader is carried along and comforted by how completely lost Miriam was and how she found solace in all the things that sustained her: books, music, art, friends, love, swimming, and of course the sea.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

224 pages, Hardcover

Published August 24, 2023

Reviews

[Molly Blakeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was hoping to link my love of sea and #deaddad. Not the best book- focused lots on her own life understandably but I wanted more about grief ha ha
Got some nice quotes eg: the realisation that the worst can happen, we can lose the most precious people in the world to us, but the world does not stop spinning. And we should not stop living. They would hate to see us sad. They want us to live, to be bright and happy and optimistic, because at the end of the day, happiness is a choice;

“I know in my heart I’m not alone and that certainty of strength will see me through the rest of my life”

“Your sea is my sea”

“The currents around it are too rough to sail through. It’s too dangerous to swim. So cast down your anchor and maybe rest your tired head a bit”

[Beachcomber · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve read a few books about grief, since losing my Dad. And I think they vary wildly, much as a person’s grief can vary so much from other people’s. I picked this because it said it was an exploration of grief and recovery, and I thought it might have something I could learn from.

I wish I could say there was, but unfortunately this wasn’t the book for me. It went into great detail about her family which I totally get. And just as much detail about the sea, swimming, maps and green cathedrals of water. It talks a lot about the illnesses and the loss of her parents and sister. What it didn’t particularly do - for me, and your mileage may vary - was talk about how she learned to navigate the grief. That’s just my personal experience, and clearly other reviewers have had different feelings, for which I’m happy for them. The book was lyrically, poetically written, but as a few others have said - it’s very literary and at times purple prose to overly describe things. It’s not a style of writing that I enjoy, though I can appreciate the skill in writing it.

Ultimately, I hope that this book does help people - it just wasn’t for me unfortunately.

[John Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended for anyone who is really into sea swimming and who has recently lost someone very close.

[Mairead Hearne (swirlandthread.com) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is My Sea by Miriam Mulcahy was published with Eriu (Bonnier Irish Imprint) August 24th and is described as 'a memoir about death, how to grieve, and the healing power of the sea.'

A powerful read, Miriam Mulcahy has written a book that will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one and has been completely levelled by the overwhelming feeling of grief and regret that follows. Everyone handles the grieving process differently. There are no set rules, no right or wrong. Each individual has to carve their own path through it. In This is My Sea, Miriam Mulcahy reflects on her own very personal journey as she witnessed her family disappearing one by one before her eyes. She was unable to stop their pain and suffering, watching on as each slipped away. Her wonderful father was the first to leave them, shocking the family and putting a gaping hole in their lives. Her mother was strong, suffering yet enduring her loss but, within a few years, cancer took her, followed by Miriam's sister a short time after. Within seven years Miriam Mulcahy's life was changed beyond comprehension. Her own partnership also collapsed during that time, leaving her a single mother with four young children to rear. She got through the autopilot routines of the day but underneath Miriam wasn't coping too well.

The sea had always played a huge part in Miriam's life. Her parents, both passionate swimmers, discovered a little part of Kerry, where they returned to regularly, to a mobile home. Here, in a small site overlooking the pier and waters of Rath, the footprints of the Mulcahy family were embedded in the path to the sea. All weather and any season, would see them loving the ocean and the secret beauty it held in its depths. In order to try and make sense of her grief Miriam would return again and again to Rath over those seven years, alone or with family. She sought and ofttimes achieved the solace she searched for in order to assist her with coping with life. This wild sea off the coast of Kerry was her saviour, her stepping stone back to living a life without her mother, father and sister by her side.

'The Atlantic is wild, clear, unpredictable and magnificent. It holds secrets you have to go deep and far to hear. It's a startling, vivid green that other seas dream of being. Yet it holds qualities of night that are visible during the day, it's a green of sleep and dreams and rest, it's the green of peace and perfection, it's the work of the moon, the shifting of the tides, it's mercurial and magical, and when I swim in this water I know I am home. This green, this impossible green that intensifies and builds into a combination of white, turquoise, aqua, blue layers, this is my soul's colour, pure and the best part of who I am'

Along with the sea, Miriam's books and passion for reading and writing kept her sane. She had great friends but she needed to escape and be by herself to process what was happening to her. A retreat in West Cork provided a moment of calm, one she returned to many times. Her ability to harness the power of the sea, alongside her time spent in the tranquillity of West Cork and her writing, combined to give Miriam the strength and the courage to get up everyday and get on with her life.

Miriam Mulcahy has had very challenging experiences but she has put these experiences to good use by assisting others to explore their grief and to not always fear it. Miriam Mulcahy is an inspirational individual, with an incredible passion and belief in the power of the sea to help combat the feelings of hopelessness and despair that follow grief.

This is My Sea is an emotional and commanding book packed with poignant stories of family and love, of pain and fear, of grief and suffering. It is also a beautifully written, heartfelt expression of courage and hope, an extraordinarily uplifting book about life and living it to the fullest.

'Being on Rath without them is so hard, but it's also the place they come closest to us. They return and reappear, in memory and in the heart, when I plunge in the water and take a swim, they are here whispering to me from the green water, telling me to swim out further, to the deep, where I will leave other people's noise and chatter and hear what they are saying to me again'

[Wendy Armstrong · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a skill in being able to write movingly about bereavement, making its most mundane aspects unbearably sad, without having to actually keep using the words 'grief', 'tragedy', 'devastation' etc. If you like spare and economical writing on death, this is not it. This book is wall-to-wall sea, topography and orienteering metaphors. Grief is signposted by "peaks of devastation", "huge yawning chasms" and "massive craters".

The chapters about the deaths of Mulcahy's elderly parents are so overwrought that my empathy disappeared down one of her craters. When her father dies, she is "left behind, on land, in a world we could not navigate, broken, shattered, smashed ... How could we walk a single step without him?" .... "The world is now a series of massive craters, waiting for us to tumble in. There are impossibly high mountains we will never be able to climb and treacherous marshes and swamps that will swallow us whole".

Mulcahy idolizes her parents: "How can you trust in anything when the man you most adored, the man you loved most in all the world, the man who was the ground beneath your feet, whose eyes you only had to look into to know how loved you were..... is being wheeled to the morgue?". And soon after: "How would we know we were loved without being able to look into his eyes?".

Breaking the news to her kids that their grandfather is dead is "telling them the untellable". She is furious when people offer platitudes. "People didn't know; they could not know. They ran from us." I had to remind myself that she was talking about her father dying at 68 of "heart disease and damage caused by forty years of heavy, relentless smoking". To other people, "such a tragedy happening to them quite simply did not bear thinking about". Seriously? Even Mulcahy says later that "everyone has a bypass story (this is Ireland, after all)".

When her elderly mother dies of cancer she rages: "Why her? Why me, again, why us?". Her anger becomes "an anchor to moor myself in an unpredictable sea". And again: "anger, my only anchor in an oarless, rudderless, sail-less boat". I found one florid chapter so crammed with sea metaphors that I almost gave up: "You are in a tiny boat, helpless and defenceless before the shadow of the rock. There is no sail, no rudder, no oars, no engine. Your world has lost its shape, its form, its parameters and boundaries have dissolved and disappeared. There is nothing here but sky and water, water everywhere, and the vast deeps and kelp forests below you that are alive. You are floating on top of another universe. How easily that surface shatters. The worst thing possible has happened. I have lost the person I needed the most". And: "This is not a tide that goes out. It’s a whirlpool, constantly churning and if you get trapped in it, can take you down."

There's much repetition. "… you’re here without navigation, without maps. Yes, you have a compass somewhere, but you pull it out, and its arrow swings wildly, incomprehensibly. It’s no longer working". And again: "Our compasses swung wildly". And later, she and her kids "are like a compass, I think. They are the directions, and I am the arrow".

The section about her sister's death is really good. Objectively, from a stranger's point of view, this is a genuine and awful tragedy and is well written. In contrast to the gushing about her parents, the siblings' relationship is complicated and much more interesting to readers who don't know the family. The section about her kids, however ("This summer Aoibh flew to Boston with a gang of her friends to work for the summer") should have been saved for the annual Christmas card to friends and family.

Much of the content isn't universally relatable or as fascinatingly tragic to readers as it is to Mulcahy and family, and as 'an exploration of grief and recovery' it just felt too forced and overblown to be moving or useful. 2.5 stars.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Breath on breath, stroke on stroke, go out as far as you can. It doesn’t matter how wild and turbulent the waves are; you can navigate anything. If you stay calm and focused, the sea, the lightest, darkest force on our planet, this body of water that connects every continent, every person on the planet, will hold you. You have to trust you will be held, that the waves, if you allow them, will carry you back to shore. It’s in you, the power to make it back - this is what they taught you, this is how they made you, this is who you are.” (p.10-11)

“…the relentless, unstinting demands of grief and motherhood. Neither abates, nor ever stops asking.” (p.15)

“Like people needed sleep, she needed light; she locked herself into the glare of the sun the way other women kneeled in a church.” (p. 84)

“And I am liberated, I am free, Mam, because I have your strength and grace and love. My sky is your sky, your stones are my stones, your sand is my sand, and your sea is my sea; these are the words you gave me.” (p. 107)

“…I had what she had, that ability in the mind to travel, to visit unknown spaces, to go so deep you left this world and visited others. When we visit Kerry is the only time I fully accept this part of me, and maybe that is why I am so happy there.” (p.123)

“And you hold them, your baby sisters and know, ‘We are right, we are four, we are love’” (p. 124)

“I left her, a witch beside the fire, wrapped in whisky, scarves, blankets and laughter, in astounding courage and grace that to this day still blinds me and takes my breath away.” (p. 156)

“They possess, in spades, Beckett’s strange thing that never fails: a golden glitter, a determination to keep trying that makes my heart sing.” (p. 192)

“Just like long hikes teach us about our strengths and dimensions, how far we can go, what we can cope with, so too does grief. It’s blowing the horn on the underpasses of motorways and ancient bridges and shouting ‘Up the Muls!’ We’ve got this. We can do this.” (p. 193)

“It will never be too cold for a swim and every swim will be worth it, a sacred talisman of salt and minerals and wave to imprint and tattoo on my soul to carry me through winter.” (p. 199)

“You will know him by his kind eyes, his sure touch, his capable hands, hands that can hold a map steady, hands that know the power of a book in them.” (p. 200)

“Walking down this road is my praying.” (p. 203)

[Catherine Booknooksandlatte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is My Sea by Miriam Mulcahy is not just a memoir that has on grief and loss, it's a book that actually speaks and offers hope to those who have or are experiencing the loss of a loved one. It was like fate that this book arrived just prior to my own mother's anniversary who we lost so unexpectedly during the inhumane tines of covid, which meant we could not be with her during her illness and final days. This book has been the balm I needed.

You may have guessed from the title that the sea is the balm to Miriam's deep grief, having suffered the death of her beloved parents and younger sister in a short seven year period. As Miriam fights to stay afloat during the breakdown of a long-term relationship and navigates a new passage of time as a single mother to four children, the presence of the sea is her vital solace to survival.

I'm lucky enough to live near the Atlantic Sea, and it has always given me a source of peace and calm when the anguish of loss and life's challenges have seemed overwhelming. Miriam's descriptions of the beauty and natural power of the sea's embrace are poetic,it was often like I was reading my own thoughts on paper. Miriam's shows the healing nature held by the mysterious green and blues of the sea, it's scent and the power of the rolling waves. Miriam's honesty and tender experiences often made me feel as if I was reading a diary or journal.

I had been afraid that I might find this memoir too focused on the sadness and heartbreak of losing close family, and I was happily wrong as it offered hope, sincere hope and positivity and most importantly life lessons on returning to nature for that vital head space and grounding. The imagery, poetic prose, and open grief brought tears and memories flooding back, yet it was such a cathartic and utterly beautiful tender read. A must-read for those who have lost and those who are afraid of loss.

[Ciara H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably not the warmest choice for reading in January.
January is a time of grief for me, having lost my sister in 2019 and my grandmother in 1993.
My love of both of these women and my increasingly obsessive love of the sea married beautifully with this book.
It's not a sad book but a real book of experience. A book of grief, not sadness, because grief is much greater than sadness, much deeper, much darker, much crueller.
The sections on the death of Ais, the author's sister, were particularly poignant for me.
Not a hard read but, at times, hard to read because it was hard to feel.

[Blathnaid QUINN · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this wonderful book last week. I loved reading it, compelling reading, page after page. It has stayed closely with me since finishing it and Miriam and her exploration of grief have been in my thoughts often, it is one of those books that is hard to move on from. Mostly I want to congratulate Miriam for sharing her story so beautifully.....she deserves all the praise, glory, joy and success that this book brings and much more! May it come her way in abundance.

[Aidan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book you should read in the good old fashioned way of hard copy so you can pass it on to anyone you know who has recently lost a loved one. The exploration of grief for the loss of your parents and family, which comes to us all at some stage, is indeed very relatable. I highly recommend it and share it with anyone who needs help at the time of grief.

[Micheal · Rating 5 out of 5]

A soulsearing account of a personal history of loss and survival, I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand grief from the inside looking out. The author's writing gently takes you by the hand and guides you through the emotional highs and lows of her 7 year journey of loss.

[David Coffey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a real find. It is beautifully written, from the heart. I would highly recommend it. There is grief certainly , but also hope and resilience. It will stay with me for a long time.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

gorgeous meditation on grief and loss, and an ode to family

[Phai___ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5