I nearly drowned the summer I was 13. We lived 20 miles inland, and I would sneak away on the bus to the Pacific Ocean. I took the 37 bus down Euclid and would end up on the shore in less than two hours. The bus moved slowly through the Orange County traffic. Stopping to pick up maids and janitors, along with the disabled, the poor, and kids like myself who were too young or too poor to drive, the bus filled with an assortment of the poor, the immigrant, and the young. Most of the working people and the disabled stopped off well before we hit the ocean.
That summer no one noticed whether I was around or not. My mom was struggling to get sober and to recover from heart surgery. The house was focused on her recovery. She would need another year or two before she dried out; she never got sober, just dry. No one noticed my long absences.
The misnamed Pacific Ocean can be treacherous with its placid surfaces and churning undercurrents. Every year teenagers and adults drown, caught up in riptides that refuse to release them. Riptides appear suddenly as waves moving in opposite directions collide and pull you in all directions. The sand slips from beneath your feet and suddenly waist high waters are several feet over your head. Your instincts tell you to swim to shore—to swim hard. But the water holds you back. It is as if you are running hard into hurricane winds. You drown from your exhaustion.
I was a strong swimmer and unafraid of what lurked beneath. When the riptide snatched me, I panicked and headed to shore, though I knew better. The people three feet from me didn’t notice as I started to drown. A yard away their water was calm and shallow, and their feet rested firmly beneath them. The last breath before I blacked out, I remember thinking “so is that all there is?” (My mom loved Peggy Lee, and that song was her favorite. It was the sound track for her alcohol induced bouts of melancholy and thus the muzak of my childhood.) I was fished out by a lifeguard, given CPR, and transported to a nearby hospital. The family took a cab to pick me up. My brother came to get us later that night. I vaguely remember them arguing on the ride home and later that night. No one ever said anything to me about it. For the next eight years, I hung out, got high, skipped school (but I still managed to graduate in the top five of my class, go figure), and lived recklessly.
Then a car hit me while I was on a motor scooter. The car was doing 45 and I didn’t have a helmet on. I should have died. It broke my body, and at 21 I was wheelchair bound for months, and dependent on my family and friends for the smallest of things. That incident upended my life. It was humbling and liberating. When I let go of my pride and my sense of self, I found strength and grace in others. For ten plus years, I lived in gratitude to that accident. It made me stronger. I became a better person—kinder, more patient, and less shallow.
And now the summer of my 35th birthday, I should have died once again. My son did die. I would live recklessly, but my promises to my daughter Bug preclude black out drinking.
Several weeks ago the husband and I saw a therapist. We requested a woman and were given a man, we wanted to have non-Christian based therapy, and of course were given a Christian therapist. He fell all over himself to tell us how impressed he was with our grief process. (It was as if I was caught in a riptide again. I wanted to shout “I am drowning, can’t you see it?!”) Towards the end of the visit, he gently asked us if we thought God was trying to tell us something or me something, since our son died two months after my mother died. We never went back.
We are slowly moving away from what happened this summer. We are making plans for next year to travel, to write, and to maybe try once again for another child. Bug grows by leaps and bounds and becomes smarter and more beautiful by the day. The husband is so overwhelmingly grateful that I lived that it tempers his grief for the loss of our son. He looks forward to the future, our future. But I find myself hovering like a ghost at that moment when I was bleeding to death and my son was suffocating, and wondering “so is that all there is?”
