The Sea Around Them
A biographical/fiction story.
I have this story in many different forms; one day, it will come right, so I keep writing it.
Numbed and shocked by the death of his wife and their young son, consistent empathy from every source molded him into a loner.
And so, he walked the beach with his daughter. She wore the customary blue denim shorts, frayed around the leg. One hand holding some lollipop sticks collected on their walk, the other, the right hand, safely grasped by her father.
For some weeks, there had been no talk between them. The question was never asked. There was nothing to understand about death for a six-year-old girl. After learning about absence, it was a settled and arranged not to question it.
Fridays would be different, and Mondays would be difficult; he went about like one stunned, without volition or interest. He felt that he couldn’t stand it, and a strange and enervating depression began to creep over him.
The idea of putting a bullet through his head was only dismissed by the smallness of the hand he held right now.
And so he walked on the beach with his daughter. In the distance, a mass could be seen, rocking and rolling as each new wave passed under it. As the two got closer, it became obvious that the mass was, in fact, a dolphin. His daughter looked up at him. Her eyes asked a question that her mouth would not. The hand with the lollipop sticks was held up in the direction of the dead dolphin.
He wanted to turn away. Turn her attention to collecting yet more lollipop sticks or shells, anything but staring at the dead dolphin. Her tiny hand was pulling him forward.
The dolphin was over five feet in length, and its skin was shredding in parts. The eyes had already gone. An empty socket stared along the shoreline, now submerged above the water. Each time the water receded; a rivulet poured from the eye socket.
“It’s dead, Daddy, isn’t it?”
He could no longer remember what life was like before his wife’s death.
The knowledge had left him when he woke on the day after. He now accepted that he would never regain it. His life with her was over; the experience of sharing that life was gone. Death and grief were not new to him. He had known others who had died. But this time, too much was lost. He knew that he would laugh and cry and love again, but never would he be the person he still thought of as ‘himself.’ Death had brought a new life to him, and the sensations of that life were unfamiliar.
He nodded and gently squeezed her hand.
“It looks alive, Daddy. It moves when the water comes in.”
It was true; in death, as in life, the dolphin accepted the water’s pressures and took them for its own. Even the head moved, scanning the sea with empty eye sockets.
His daughter had not attended the memorial of her mummy and her brother. No bodies were ever returned after that fateful day. They drifted away, never to be found.
“Why is it dead, Daddy? Why has it got holes in its tummy?”
After the accident, he spent his days cleaning his son’s shoes, clearing them of scuff marks, lacing and unlacing them. The following days, he was unmoved by the suggestions of relatives and friends. They suggested that his daughter should decide whether or not to attend the memorial. He held out against it.
They stood together side by side, facing death.
“Who knows why things have to die, sweetheart? Who knows.”
“I’m glad fish don’t feel any pain, Daddy. It must be nice not to feel pain so much.”
No pain, just the inability to breathe, to suffocate with water. To feel life leaving amid panic and fear.
“It’s a mammal, honey. It breathes air like you and me. A dolphin isn’t a fish.”
His throat tightened. He felt the wind moving his hair, which was cool, pushing at his body.
As the waves rolled up to the dolphin it rolled onto its side. A gaping gash showed itself, and the grey entrails wriggled like worms from its belly.
“Did someone do this; did someone hurt this dolphin, Daddy?”
He looked down at his daughter, let go of her hand, and pulled her small body into his.
Somewhere out there was a fisherman who fished for his livelihood and understood the sea and its wonders. He was a fisherman who loved dolphins and whales and all the creatures that made up the undersea world where he fished. What could he tell her? What would make sense to it all?
He felt the first prick of a tear behind his eyes.
Few fishermen are rich beyond their dreams; most carve a living from meager hauls and long days. Every haul means more clothes for his children, a better education, food in the larder, and wood for the fire. On this day, his first decent haul in weeks, with several hundred pounds of fish in his net. There was joy in his heart as he hauled in the net. A joy that disappeared in anguish as the net surfaced and the dolphin struggled in the corner of the catch. There was no way to release the dolphin and keep the fish. His heart sank.
At home, the fisherman’s wife was mending clothes and packing cardboard into his daughter’s shoes, where a hole had appeared in the sole. Next month, they would have enough money for a new pair. She sat in front of the fire, a single log making heat for her while her husband fished for their livelihood.
The fisherman’s daughter loved to read about all the whales and dolphins in the oceans. One day, she told her father she wanted to swim with a dolphin. He laughed and told her that one of these days, he could take her to ‘Sea World’ and watch all the dolphins playing. He remembered her saying, rather abruptly, ‘Daddy, dolphins shouldn’t be performing outside their home. I want to see dolphins in the sea!’
He hauled the net closer. There weren’t the hundreds of pounds of fish; the dolphin had misled his expectations. But there were fish, and fish was money. Let this haul go, and he might not get another in on this day. Yesterday was bad enough, and if today was worse… well, it was too much.
There were many reasons why the dolphin lay dead in the water with a gaff slit in its belly. He returned to where he was by the sound of his daughter asking why people could be so cruel.
“We don’t know if it was cruel, darling.”
“Did someone try to catch the dolphin?”
He knelt and tried to explain death to his daughter.
“Sometimes things don’t die the way we want them to, sweetie; sometimes things die, and we don’t know why, and sometimes things die, and we do know why. It doesn’t make dying or death any easier to understand.”
“Mummy and Daniel went away, didn’t they?”
“Yes, darling, mummy and Daniel went away.”
“Did they have to die to go there?”
A hole opened up in his chest. His wife and son were buried in a luxuriant sea. Forever rolling with the currents.
“Yes, honey, they had to die to go there.”
“Can we bury the dolphin, Daddy?”
He always felt a little ashamed of his life and his inability to deal with domestic affairs. If there was a difficult situation with the children, he would leave the problem to his wife to solve. He just wanted to love his children and never be the monster.
Never have to discipline or teach the less important things, like math or algebra.
His daughter moved a few yards up the beach, fell to her knees, and started scraping at the sand with her hands. He knelt with her.
Together, they scraped at the sand until they had a huge hole three feet deep. Only he knew the sea would reclaim its own on the next tide or the one after that.
Waiting for a wave to assist him, he hauled the carcass into the hole.
“Mummy would want to say a prayer, Daddy. Is that alright?”
“Do you have one you could say?”
“I only know one. Can I say that?”
That would be very nice. You say the one you know.”
“May you, our God, bless this Thanksgiving feast and all of us who shall share it in Your holy name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen .”
She brought her hand down from her face.
“That was a very nice prayer. Let’s continue our walk, shall we?” She took hold of her father’s hand, and together, they walked up the beach.
The idea of a single shot to the head, or the idea that alcoholism might be the answer, shamed him while he held onto the hand of his daughter.
A fisherman had to make a difficult decision somewhere not so far away. It was right that the dolphin should die.
“Daddy, do you like living near the sea?”
“Yes, do you?”
“Yes, but you and me, we live with the sea on one side of us, don’t we?
Mummy and Daniel live with the sea all around them, don’t they?”
“Yes, darling, they do.”
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