The Tide Always Returns

I waded into the ocean at 3:17 AM, the Caribbean water warm as breath against my skin. The resort was dark behind me, all those palm trees just silhouettes against a sky thick with stars. I'd been swimming every night since arriving—a week ago—but this would be the last.

Grief does strange things to you. I hadn't been able to eat more than a few bites at a time. I'd wake at strange hours and lie awake until dawn, the empty space beside me where Richard should've been feeling like a wound. The latest development: I'd developed a sudden, inexplicable fear of driving. The moment I gripped a steering wheel, my chest would tighten until I could barely breathe.

So here I was, renting a bungalow on St. John for a month because I couldn't bear to get behind the wheel of my own car.

Richard would have laughed. He'd always had this absurd, practical way of looking at things. "Feelings are just weather, Em," he'd say during my darkest periods, even before he got sick. "Let them blow through. They always do."

The irony was, now he was the weather, and I was the one trying to weather him.

Tomorrow morning I'd scatter his ashes off the southern point of the island, where we'd honeymooned twelve years ago. Then I'd fly home to Chicago and try to figure out how to live the rest of my life—however long that turned out to be—at 45, widowed, and hollowed out by a cancer that took him in seven months flat.

I treaded water, floating on my back, looking up at the stars. The hat floated beside me—Richard's favorite, a battered Panama he'd worn through summers of lakefront festivals and winter escapades to Florida. He'd looked ridiculous in it, and he'd known it. That was the point.

I should have felt ridiculous too, a grown woman swimming with a dead man's hat at 3 AM in a foreign ocean. But I didn't. I felt like I was finally, somehow, keeping him afloat.

"You'd tell me to stop being so dramatic," I said aloud to the water. "You'd tell me grief isn't a performance piece."

The waves rocked me gently, and somewhere in the distance, I heard the faint, rhythmic splash of another swimmer. I wasn't alone in this midnight ritual. Somewhere out there, someone else was swimming through their own darkness, keeping their own ghosts company.

I grabbed the hat and struck out for shore, my strokes stronger now. The salt water stung my eyes, and I let it. Tomorrow I'd say goodbye properly. Tomorrow I'd cry in the ways I hadn't been able to cry at the funeral, surrounded by well-meaning friends who'd wanted me to be okay before I was.

But tonight, I'd just keep swimming—carrying Richard's hat through the dark water, carrying the shape of him in the hollow space between my ribs, learning how to be heavy and buoyant all at once.