There’s never anything smooth or easy when it comes to boats, and our closing process on Paros has been no exception: at the last minute, our financing fell apart, and we had to scramble to come up with alternatives on a short deadline. A glitch in dealing with one of the conditions of our post-survey counter-offer took longer than expected to resolve. We received an unexpected offer to purchase a sister-ship at a considerably lower price (which we ultimately declined, obviously). The process stumbled along fitfully and stressfully, extending what already seemed like a perpetual state of displacement.
So I was prepared to feel some sense of triumph and celebration when everything was finally all signed and completed and we took possession of our fantastic new boat. Getting the deal done, getting moved in, getting her moored, taking care of all the necessary and innumerable details of boat ownership, had become the uttermost focus of my life over the past weeks and I was looking forward to some triumphant release of all that accumulated tension when the deal was finally done.
But the last weekend before our scheduled closing date, as I was fretting over financing and insurance and bottom paint and whether or not the small locks were going to be open, life happened. Saturday night, we got a call that my aunt had been admitted to the hospital with a dangerous blood clot in her leg. Already faced with some serious health problems, she inevitably experienced complications during treatment. We went to bed uncertain about the prognosis.
That same night, though I didn’t learn of it until early the next morning, a close friend from high school, just off a plane from Minneapolis and waiting for a cab, turned to his wife and said, “I’m feeling dizzy.” Then he collapsed and died.
Nothing to do with the boat seems all that important now.
So the last week of negotiating the final arrangements for the purchase were interspersed with funeral arrangements; a call to the broker was followed by a call to some distant friend or another to break or share news; a visit to the boatyard was trailed by a visit to the crematorium… one last view of the boat before it went back in the water, one last glimpse of Dave before his cremation. I made the final arrangements on the road while driving back from the funeral in Spokane. We took possession the day after we got back to Seattle.
I know I should be excited, but mostly what I feel right now is sad.
My aunt, at least, is doing better, and fortunately we were able to visit her while we were in Spokane for Dave’s funeral.
We’ve been aboard for a few days now and it has been wonderful. We’re almost entirely moved in, and we’re swimming in extra space and luxuriating in unheard-of amenities like refrigeration and an oven and forced-air heat (not that we need it, with the sudden advent of summer). There are supplies to be sorted out, new systems to learn, cables to be traced, electronics to be understood. And the sun is coming out now and the marina is coming alive, and normally I’d be eager to dive into it all to start figuring it out. But I just don’t find myself all that interested in any of it at the moment.
I feel as though I’m being stupid and selfish in this because death is the great universal experience and everyone has lost someone close at some point. I have, for that matter. I suppose that there is an extra cold heaping of reality that hits anyone when the first close friend among their peer group passes away. Dave was a day past his thirty-ninth birthday when he died. While no one would call that “young” (and certainly the degree to which it represented, in fact, “old,” had become an increasing source of mutual needling between us) it was still about twenty years shy of a date that I had expected to be burying high school buddies, barring accident.
To a large extent my friends from high school remain my friends today. Dave and I lived together on and off after graduation, and in fact moved here to Seattle together. In the years since, until I moved aboard the boat three years ago, we had never lived more than about five blocks apart. You don’t think much about these things as you’re living them. But it’s that proximity, and those experiences, that bind you to people, sometimes in ways, and to such extent, that you don’t fully realize until later.
He only came out sailing with us once but he was excited about the new boat. Dave enjoyed new and adventurous experiences but he liked his creature comforts also, and given a private cabin, a three-burner propane stove with oven to indulge in his hobby of cooking, he and his wife would have had a great time aboard this summer. When you have had all those shared experiences, your brain somehow hardwires itself to anticipate more, and sadness is what you get when your conscious mind overrides those expectations with the reality that they are never going to happen again.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dave’s attitude toward life lately. When I spoke at his funeral, I told a story that he liked to tell, about how he once spent three hours trying to talk me into going sledding on the first big snowfall of the year, and how I never went. He thought that story said a lot about me, and I thought it said a lot about him, and we were probably both right. He was never afraid to go out and do what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it. I have always been more cautious.
While we both had our regrets over some decisions we made from those different fundamental natures, I suspect he had fewer. Whether it was just his nature, or something he had learned along the way, he had figured out that you can often get away with having your fun and still coming out ahead. He had a successful career, but he wasn’t a nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy. He always did as well, or better, than I did, even if I spent hours fretting and planning and scheming while he was kicking back in an all-night poker game. He was living proof that the consequences of being laid-back were never as dire as I might have imagined.
When Mandy and I decided to move aboard a boat and take up a life less land-bound, I was fighting that cautious nature, and in some ways I was winning. But it’s not a one-time bout; caution can keep creeping up on you, subtly inclining your choices toward safety and rigor, away from novelty and excitement. I had made a conscious decision at some point to spend more time doing things I enjoyed and less time running on the financial hamster wheel, but that’s a decision you have to keep making. It’s all too easy to fixate on the degree to which your income has receded and to discount the freedom and joy that summers spent cruising have offered instead.
It gets easier to put that balance in perspective again when something like this happens. I don’t think Dave had a lot of regrets in life but he sure wasn’t done living it all yet, either. The knowledge, visceral and immediate, that in one way or another we are all as liable as he was to end up with much left undone is a spur to me, once again, to not put off my ambitions overmuch in favor of ephemeral security. The best security, I think, may be to take a page from his book… find something to laugh about in everything, have fun when the opportunity presents itself, go sledding when the snow is falling.
So it’s time to re-name our new boat and get on with sailing. Paros isn’t a terrible name but we don’t love it and it holds no meaning for us the way it must have for the prior owners. Since the documentation has to be re-filed at time of purchase, it’s an easy time to change it. You’re probably cringing at this point because you think that the punchline to all this is that we have decided to name our new boat Dave. That would have been exactly the sort of incongruous prank I might have played on Dave when he was alive, but it would just seem cruel now that he is unable to retaliate in kind.
Instead, my wife suggested Rosie and that’s what we’ll call her. Rosie was our calico cat’s name; she also died in June, two years ago, and she’s buried on a bluff overlooking the mooring buoy we often use in Port Hadlock. We’ll look up from the deck of her namesake and wave and hope she has found a ray of sunshine to rest in.
A way to commemorate Dave is more complicated and harder to settle. He had no children but left behind both parents, a younger brother, and a shocked and loving wife. My thoughts lately have been mostly for her, but, like all mourners, I have come to realize that there is nothing that can be said and there is nothing to be done that can in any way impact the vast depths of that loss. All words ring hollow, all deeds fall flat.
In time, no doubt, I will want to sail again. Similarly, I’m sure, some opportunity will arise to make my memories of Dave something lasting and meaningful. Until then, the best I can do is look around me at this wondrous new vessel we have acquired, and resolve to use it to take us to all the places we most want to go in life.