[I’m taking a vulnerable step and uploading the audio I recorded for this, which is often how I write, but usually I only put up the transcript. I feel like it’s more connecting, somehow. I hope it speaks to you]
It's eight months since we gave your bones back to the sea, one year and eight months since you left a distance I cannot comprehend, let alone hold.
The ground today is covered with a thick layer of frost-crystals sparkling in the low winter sun, cascading rainbows tumbling over leaves and rocks. The sand of the shore is stiff beneath my feet, resisting any pressure, suspended in animation. I wish that I could be frozen in time. I wish that time would stop and stand still in this frost. For me, such big things have opened up since you left – such huge questions that still need grappling with, and I'm so spent and tired from working things out. Can my body be suspended if I just keep it below zero? Can I pause the inevitable and the difficult and the unknown? Can I just hang here at the end of the pier, looking out at the boats and this still icy blue water, just you and me for a while? Because that's it, isn't it, Dad? I come down here when I just need to be still, because that's where you met me. For most of my life and our relationship, you gave me space and peace and a curious mind to sit and figure things out.
There were ice crystals floating on the water this morning, and they curved, curling trails across the surface of the sea and split it into light and shadow in a way that I've never seen before. And it was mesmerizing. For a minute, I sort of panicked, and I thought, Oh, my God, the sea is frozen. I've never seen that. So not possible, but the light really played a trick on my mind. My first thought was, but, but you're in there like you won't be able to swim around and have fun and do your thing and go off around the world and come back again, or whatever it is that my weird brain thinks that the molecules of your carbon do. It makes me laugh, because it's so silly and childish, but there we are. I was a child. I was your child, and I will always be your child, therefore I am a child.
Yeah, I am a 38-year-old child, who's still a little bit lost at sea, but I'm definitely making inroads to coming back to shore, and I think I've probably got a really sturdy paddle, maybe more than a paddle. Maybe I've got an engine now, and I'm definitely cutting a clearer line across the water now. But I'm havering, I’m havering. There's life decisions there. There's two forks in the road. You know, it's funny to find yourself in a space where this mother shaped thing in you suddenly opens up at the point in life, finally, where physicality and reality make that an issue and a problem and one that's not easy to unpick.
Yeah, I think you liked having kids, but it's funny, it took me to today to come down to the water and think about my own sense of adventure and feeling of being some kind of voyager, whether that's metaphorically through words and stories or like literally, like around the world, like you. You were a voyager in those ways, too. And I was talking to my therapist about how much my creativity all these years has really been sort of materialized escape. It's been me pushing against so many hard things, and now that it turns out the hardest of those has kind of been snapped away, and suddenly I'm lurching forward with the same force, but I'm going at thrice the speed because there's the glue on the bottom of my boots has come unstuck that I've always been tugging against – and here I am just pelting forth with creativity, not as an escape and not as a resistance, but just as an expression. And that's kind of new territory, and I don't really know what to do with it. And it's, yeah, it's strange. It's an interesting one.
And I'm here and I'm thinking, Well, what things were pushing you onto boats to go out and see the world? Was it curiosity? Was it bright-eyed, you know, taste for adventure, or was it escape? You were 17 when you decided that you were going to be a seafarer and not a something else. And, yes, this was the 70s. This was the time of of freedom and exploration and liberation and a lot of kind of just listening to your heart, man, (and prog rock), and yeah, I wonder you were so young that maybe you weren't escaping so much, but I don't know that. You know, I think I can figure out that you had a pretty steady, healthy, loving home life. So I reckon it's probably being inspired and just wanting to go and have some fun, but I think maybe there was an element of freedom there as well. Given that your parents were in their forties when they adopted you, I think your dad was even possibly in his fifties. They were later parents than most. So yeah, maybe there was an element of generational differences that were a bit constraining.
And I can see you sort of wanting to, because you were always so behind us, getting out and doing our own thing and building our own lives and getting on with life and getting jobs and just going out and living our own lives. So I wonder if, yeah, that's partly where that came from. It's a strange thing. I'm always asking questions about you, and now you're not here to answer them, so I just have to make my best guess. But it's the most beautiful day today, a year and eight months since you left, and it's criminal, because whenever I come down here, you're the one person I want to stand on the fucking pier with. And of course, you're all over it and around it metaphysically, but you are not here in the way that you once were and in the way that I needed you. So yeah, thanks for that. Yeah. Happy. Almost December. It's gonna be our second Christmas without you.
I don't really know what to do with that. The first was so bewildering and discombobulated, it was still a shock, and now it's just going to be the new normal, and new normals are sometimes really hard, so I'm really going to fucking miss you. I'm going to miss you giving us a new playlist, and I'm going to miss you making chomping sounds on your Terry's chocolate orange and you laughing at whatever cheesy shit is on the TV for Christmas. Your chortled. Did you know that? Did you know you chortled? Not everyone chortles. I think I can chortle. My husband would say I chortle at my own jokes, which is probably true. I think I get that from you… ‘the family trough’... We were good at laughing, all of us, actually, we were always good at laughing, and we still are good at laughing, which is nice, but it's just less funny without you, because you had the best laugh. [laughs] That's a really bad impression. I'm sorry.
But you used to do the thing where you're like, you'd move your head back so your chin would kind of tuck, and you'd kind of laugh from under your giant mustache. And there were other times where it's like an incredulous laugh, and you'd be more like, [laughs], you know, I miss it. I miss it so much. I wish it. I wish I had a recording of your laugh. I don't know if I do. I have recordings of you speaking and telling me your stories at sea, and I listened to them, and it's really nice, and it's like you're back in the room, but you me, we used to have a right good giggle. Sometimes we would get ourselves in such knots that we couldn't breathe, and we'd kind of be looking at each other like, this is class, isn't it? And I just miss that so much. I miss it dad, and miss that camaraderie, you know, just laughing for the sake of laughing. [cries] I still cry too much. Maybe not enough. I don't know.
I just really miss you, and I still wish I could yank your bones back out of the water and rebuild you, but I can't, and I'm really glad that you're free, and you're out there and you're free of all the crap that was going on. But, you know, selfish, I suppose it just sometimes I just want my dad and I need to be parented. And you may not have been absolutely perfect, but you were kind of, you know, not bad. And we're always children. I think that's what I'm learning in your absence, is I will always be this child, needing my dad.
You old bugger. Now come back and make some more fart jokes, please. Even if that's all it is… that'll be enough.
I miss going to you and asking your advice on things. And I miss showing you and reminding you that you were not your disability. You know you were just you and you were still you, and no matter what anyone else made you feel, I knew that. You know, you never stop being awesome.
Too many tears, always crying. The sea is fucking half me now… I made half an ocean with my sadness. Are you impressed? I probably could make three worlds over and then some, if I allowed myself. Planetfuls of grief. Anyway.
I'm not always a good writer, Dad, especially when I'm sad. It is what it is, isn't it?
So today, today is the blue marble kind of day. The sea is mirror, a mirror to the sky, and it's perfect. And it's just 360-degrees of ice-white and pale blue and cerulean, and then a little bit of yeah, that lovely lemony yellow just along the horizon. And you sent me a song – thanks for that – in your way, the other day, and it's been stuck in my head since, maybe because we've had such good weather.
[Sings]
Away beyond the blue
one star belongs to you
one star belongs to you
and every breath I take
I'm closer loser to that place
Well, baby, I'm gonna meet you there
on the outskirts of the sky
oh, baby, I'm gonna meet you there
and we will fly
away beyond the blue.
Beth Nielsen, Chapman: one of your absolute favorites. I think you put it on more than one compilation, actually, for for us. I wish I could remember the year, definitely 1990 something. But I miss you.
And I guess I’m just saying I’m always looking for you out there.
Away, away, beyond the blue.