Beautiful Lives & Beautiful Deaths

I have lived the most beautiful lives and died the most beautiful deaths is a real thought I had the other day while surfing. I had just paddled for a wave and then pulled out of it at the last second, when I realized I would have to drop in at a particularly steep angle. I wasn’t in any real danger—the wave was sharp but small—and yet, for the span of a heartbeat, I could picture myself pearling, my body thrown headfirst into the balletic arch of an angry scorpion, and my board pulled down behind me, unceremoniously yanked by my leash from its dolphin-like spirals up toward the sky, as if it were gasping for one last breath. 

It all would happen in a matter of seconds, but if you can imagine it in slow motion, it’s an unexpectedly exquisite dance. It is indeed a beautiful death. Instead of taking the chance, however, I shifted my weight back toward the tail and pulled up on the rails with my hands, removing my surfboard and myself from the momentum of the pitching wave. Every time I paddled for another wave that afternoon, the sentence replayed itself inside my head, as if it were a well-worn mantra: beautiful lives…beautiful deaths…beautiful lives…beautiful deaths.

We often speak of the end of the world as if it is an event that will catch us off guard and erase our existence instantaneously, like the plot of a summer blockbuster coming to fruition. But I’ve lost count of the number of times I have lived and died.

I’m thinking not only of every wave I’ve caught and fumbled but of the many apartments I believed to be home, of every first and last kiss with someone I have loved. Each time I have understood my reality to be one thing—each time I have understood myself to be one thing—only for that thing to end or morph and render my existence brand new again, I have died a kind of death and then lived again. Like a lot of people, for example, I remember the last time I left my office, on a Tuesday evening in March 2020, unaware that I would never again see that place where I had spent most of my waking hours for years. And yet we eventually showed up to other jobs, offices, coworkers, realities.

What if the end of the world is a constant rather than a finale?

To catch a wave in the first place, you have to sit close to the most powerful, and the most intimidating, section of it. You have to sit close to its heart. That peak itself is the wave’s last breath, so to speak, and when you catch it, you’re riding its final exhale to shore. “Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds,” writes William Finnegan in his surfing memoir, Barbarian Days. “They’re quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction.…The best days at the best breaks have a Platonic aspect—they begin to embody a model of what surfers want waves to be. But that’s the end of it, that beginning.”

In the water, as on land, death begets life begets death begets life. Surfers put ourselves through this cycle over and over again, learning to embody resiliency along the way. We pull out of a wave, aware of the risk and the discomfort, and then we drop into the next one knowing full well that we may not make it, because, well, what if we do? To really live often demands that we place ourselves in the most vulnerable position, be it close to the heart of a wave or close to the heart of another for a first kiss.

The beauty of surfing is inextricable from the fear of it, even if, as I’ve gotten older, the balance has shifted to favor fear. I didn’t drop into that wave the other day because I was afraid. I didn’t used to be like this.

I broke a board once in heavy winter surf at El Porto, when I was a junior in high school. The tail half, still attached to my ankle by my leash, pulled me under the water again and again during a massive set. My body tumbled helplessly, like a rag in a washing machine, for more than a couple of breaths. I could see the nose of my board bobbing in toward the shore, both a beacon of safety and a thing worth saving in itself, and somehow I managed to swim toward it until I was sputtering on the sand. 

In the water, as on land, death begets life begets death begets life. Surfers put ourselves through this cycle over and over again. We pull out of a wave, aware of the risk and the discomfort, and then we drop into the next one knowing full well that we may not make it, because, well, what if we do?

A younger boy from my varsity surf team was near me in the water that morning, the definition of a grom: short, sun-blond, already very good at surfing. “Dude,” he said to me at lunch, “I thought you were going to drown out there!” I, too, for the first time in my life, had figured I was going to die, but when I was finally able to drag myself out of the water and onto the beach, I could only cry for the two halves of my beloved custom Becker, one tucked under each of my arms. Youth bestows a certain recklessness that comes along with believing that death is very far away, until one day you recognize how many deaths you’ve survived. 

If today, in my late thirties, I am more often than not afraid when I surf, why do I paddle back out?

In his book, The Drop, Thad Ziolkowski writes about surfing as both an addiction and a palliative. To wit, he describes his decision to paddle out the day after 9/11, the very morning after the world ended. “People find it strange or worse that I went surfing the day after 9/11, but for me it was like going to church—like psychic medicine, like sacrament,” Ziolkowski writes. “I was thinking about surfers who had called in sick to their jobs at Cantor Fitzgerald [in order to take advantage of a hurricane swell that morning] and lived—the mystery of who lived and who died.” 

On his way to the beach that day, Ziolkowski got lost near JFK airport. While making a sudden U-turn, he alarmed police officers in a nearby security kiosk. When they rushed out to question him, all he could say was, “I’m just trying to go surfing.”

Every time a surfer breaks a board, every time a surfer is forced to hold their breath longer than they thought possible, and, yes, even every time a surfer pearls on a puny wave, they experience a version of death. And yet we’re all just trying to go surfing again. 

It’s an impulse that is even more perplexing when you consider that, in addition to being scary, surfing is absurd: It involves a ridiculous amount of effort for only an occasional, fleeting payoff. In Los Angeles, where I grew up and live again now, surfing is a lot of paddling through crowded lineups at pointbreaks or crowded, closed-out beachbreaks and then not catching anything because of that crowd, or because the winds shifted, or because you brought the wrong board for the conditions, or because the Surfline cams—which you triple-checked before you left your house—lied. And then when you do finally catch something, it’s for just a few seconds, maybe close to half a minute if you’re having a very good day.

But during those seconds on a wave, sense and rationality cease to exist, because to hurl yourself down a small cliff of fast-moving water, your body must abandon your thinking mind. You must override your brain, which says, loudly and sternly, No, by moving your body toward Go. In other words, you are young and willful and immortal once again.

Each time I have caught a wave, I have been suspended in these liberating seconds, where there is only my body as a kind of hitchhiker upon a pulse of energy that was generated from a storm thousands of miles away, pushing its way through quantities of water too vast to imagine to end up here, under my feet, where it will finally exhaust itself, after its long journey, as a sputter of whitewash upon the shore. It is impossible, this wave, and it is a little miraculous. When you ride it, you, too, are impossible and miraculous, existing within the threshold and no longer bound to the realities of the world.

Ziolkowski explains this in-betweenness: “The meeting of land and sea forms an elemental threshold with deep, primal resonance and magnetism. The land is like the awake rational mind of the present, the ocean the unconscious, irrational, archaic. The ocean shore is the geographic equivalent of dawn or dusk, of the transitional mode of consciousness between waking and sleep, an intermundial state in which the spirit is quietly loosened from its moorings and set adrift. Edges blur, identities become uncertain, shifting, subject to flux and transformation.”

When you are surfing, you are no one in particular. Not to sound like the groms of my youth, but the only reality when you are riding a wave is the reality that you are riding a wave. The act of surfing, in other words, forces presence. And what is presence but the ultimate expression of liminality? Presence is not yesterday or tomorrow. It is not deaths that have rebirthed you, or the one that eventually will not. Presence is another plane of existence, so divorced from the rules that, even in its fleetingness, time slows down. Think of a car accident, or a bad wipeout, or a merciful, glorious barrel.

Surfing is scary because death is scary, but every time a surfer catches a wave, they get to live a different version of life in this liminality, a beautiful and liberating one, if only for a moment or two. It’s why when I finally manage to catch a wave, only to end up face-down with water up my nose, tangled in my leash, and gasping for breath, I turn around and paddle back out again.

On a wave, your body must abandon your thinking mind. You must override your brain, which says, loudly and sternly, No, by moving your body toward Go. In other words, you are young and willful and immortal once again. Each time I have caught a wave, I have been suspended in these liberating seconds.

If you ask a surfer about the end of the world, they’ll probably tell you it’s when there are no waves and they’re stuck on dry land, waiting for a swell. But if you watch a surfer in the water, you’ll see that they’ve got it wrong. Surfing involves a lot of waiting—that part is true—whether it’s in the water or out of it. And most of the time we’re in the lineup, surfers are just sitting, facing the horizon, because that is where the waves come from. Which means that most of the time, surfers are staring down at the edge of the world, the end of the world, in anticipation of what comes next.

The journalist Susan Casey writes in her book The Wave about attending an academic conference to attempt to better understand the science behind massive waves. There, she meets a surfer-cum-researcher who validates the notion that climate change is at least partially responsible for these unpredictable oceanic monsters. “I really wouldn’t want to be a weather forecaster right now,” he says to her, “because we’re entering a time when, possibly, there is no normal anymore.” A beat later, his expression and tone change: “But that’s all the more reason to surf!” This scientist is speaking to the unpredictability of waves these days. I read it, however, as a reminder that if the world is ending, we might as well keep surfing through it.

The other day, when I thought, I have lived the most beautiful lives and died the most beautiful deaths, I wasn’t thinking about the waves I have caught and all the waves I have only just survived. I was thinking about heartbreaks and about COVID and about people and places and versions of myself I no longer know and about all the other times the world has ended in my 30-something years. And I was thinking about how, in between those endings, life was the most beautiful. Then, I paddled again.

[Illustrations by Caco Neves]