1985
The event that turned me into a father
By 1985, I’d been working with Greenpeace whenever time and family commitments permitted. But those were exciting days, and I was not a good husband or father. This realization was a journey of emotional turbulence, a struggle to balance my passion for activism with my responsibilities at home.
In July, I found myself in New Zealand, protesting the French nuclear testing in the Pacific. The destructive impact of these tests on the environment and the potential threat to human life was a cause for grave concern. It’s a mystery why governments worldwide engage in such activities, but it has become a habit to challenge them when their actions endanger humanity.
On July 10, the French government sent in secret service operatives to sink the flagship of Greenpeace, the Rainbow Warrior. It became a year of significant change for me. Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned when French intelligence detonated a bomb to sink the Rainbow Warrior in Aukland Harbour. More would have died if the neighbouring yacht owner had not been gracious enough to invite the crew aboard his yacht at the time. I was severely injured.
I woke up in an Auckland hospital. For three months, I lay still while surgeons played around with my spine.
During my recovery in a New Zealand hospital, my wife made the worrisome flight to my bedside. Her eyes, filled with love and concern, gazed at my wretched body. Her love for me was so profound that she couldn’t bear to see me in pain. This moment of her unspoken love and sacrifice is etched in my memory forever.
She wasn’t going to be loved this way. No man was going to occupy a place in her life or her children’s lives and risk himself for damned ideals.
“We’re done with this; you have no place in our lives if you continue to risk yourself when we have children at home.” Her words echoed in my mind, a constant reminder of my internal conflict. I knew I had to choose between my ideals and my family, a choice that tore me apart.
She would tell me when I was stronger that she would not have weakened. Oh God, what if she couldn’t be with me? What if she wanted me to be with her forever, but not like this? What if her eyes went deep into my soul and saw something she’d never known before?
Why was I so bloody difficult? Why couldn’t I love her like other men loved their women, adore her the way other men adored, lust after her as other men lust? But that was never my way.
I had sailed into her life like a storm-christened rigger and took her breath away because I told her, showed her, and proved that she was an exceptional person — a beautiful woman.
It was all too much. I imagined what it would be like if I never knew her smile again. What if she lived without my strange words, my unpredictable life? Would she be happier for all that?
She would have to say something. I was all I said I was; my truth affected and touched her. But that was then, before children.
She placed her hand in mine, rested her head on my chest, and sobbed.
“You’re a bastard,” she whispered. And, of course, I was precisely that.
I lay still, knowing her pain, feeling her heartbeat heavy in her breast. I wanted to be strong as a mountain and hold her while the blue and white electricity of regret entered my heart. It was over for me. I wanted her to trust and believe in me, but my actions weighed heavily on my conscience.
Some days, she sat at my bedside, trying to understand me, but her mind always drifted back to home and the children. I moved her hair just so and smiled. “Go home and take care of the children.”
Finally, she left me on Friday the seventh to go home.
“You’ll walk again, I know it — I just know it and the doctors feel confident you will.” She kissed my cheek and turned away, tearful.
I watched until she turned the corner, and that disappearance around the corner broke every barrier that held up my dignity and pride. Sobs rose from my stomach and caught in my throat. They were there when she turned back around and came toward me. She took a tissue from her bag and held it to my face.
“I’ve never seen you afraid before,” she said. There was no wild fury left. I was indeed afraid. “It’s done — your time is done. No more. We are your life now. You come home and you stay. You stay! You be a father and a husband. You will not put us through this again.”
She had walked away without saying it, and now, having courage, she had returned to my bedside to say what she felt. She held my hand and kissed my mouth. “No more, or we cannot make it.” She turned and walked away.
Together, we lived through the aftermath. Two strangers. Yes, two lovers, even though our bodies never knew intimacy for a year more. Brushing against one another occasionally, yet closer than two people joined at the hip.
I’d seen the breathtaking beauty of the arctic-bound humpback whale, the mermaid on the rock in Copenhagen, Rodin's sensual kiss, and the Alpine Clematis bending in the mountain winds. Still, I’d never seen deep inside my woman’s heart until I was on the verge of losing her through recklessness.
I’d seen every kind of heart, broken ones, paper, and the majestic half-ton heart of the migrating blue whale, but I’d never known a heart like the one inside my wife, beating for someone other than herself, hurt by life, pain tearing at her heart before being and blown away in fragments. But she’d never been hurt more than by her husband’s ‘ideals’.
As she walked away, I never saw her tears, but I knew the heartbreak was unimaginable and fierce.
The surgeons must have played it right because I walked out of there during the fourth month of treatment.
The French had bombed and sunk the Rainbow Warrior, killing one friend. Goliath had come for David and won. When I look out to sea, I don’t know why it should all come back to me so vividly, not when there are so many beautiful memories of the Warrior and so much achieved. Of course, we had our failures together, but she handed me so many friendships and adventures, and now she is long gone — never forgotten.
For years after, we were content to sail or walk to meet with our friends on the bend of Tobermory. Our children were growing up, knowing my presence and the warmth of my full-time love.
There is no question in my mind that the world loved the Rainbow Warrior. She had sailed into people’s dreams for a more humane world.
But it was also a time of hope — and that time is never past.
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