Give the Bees Some Space [#42]

Writing (and certainly living) the end of this chapter feels.

(I realize it seems like there’s an adverb missing up there — some forgotten qualifier, confirmation of my lazy proofreading, or perhaps simply of my general disregard for the confines of proper sentence structure.)

It’s true that I can’t stand proofreading and also that I care nothing for complete sentences, but I assure you, exactly zero words are missing from the tail of that first line.

The end of this chapter feels. Period.

I ache for a triumphant last lap, for a slow-motion-worthy leap off of this page and onto the next. I’m trying to remember why we did this, how we’ve grown, who we’ve met, where we’ve been; a desperate effort to somehow quantify our last 31 months as a collection of grand adventures, worthy of everything we sacrificed to make it happen.

I'm struggling.

The Good Things highlight reel exists — I’ve written about most of it — but the only show streaming in my head these days more closely resembles some tragic docudrama than the feel-good epic-adventure flick we paid for. Due in large part, I suppose, to the fact that October nearly broke us (but mostly me).

Soul Crushing Trauma Story #1:

Those of you connected to BEAM REACH ADVENTURES on social media perhaps know intimately the story of how a day-old duckling drowning near our marina slip in late-July, came to be Rose — an impossibly sweet member of our family. (If you’re not on social media, that’s pretty much the gist.) In a nutshell, Rose was my shadow.

The genetic programming that makes imprinting a real event that happens in real life between real creatures is remarkable. 

Science for the win. 

For 11 weeks, I had a duck-daughter named Rose and I loved her an exaggerated amount.

We never intended to keep Rose, simply to spare her from certain death, provide her a safe place to recover, and then reunite her with another young whistling duck family nearby. But the whistling ducks and ducklings we’d spent all of June and July admiring, up and disappeared come early-August. Like, literally disappeared.

Fast forward seven weeks later.

Having outgrown her plastic Home Depot tote bin, Rose enjoys full-time access to the run of the boat during the day and takes over the entire guest cabin each night. The owner of the feed store one town over knows my “order” by memory, and employees here at the marina and the resort make it a priority to say hi to Rose when they pass by.

By week eight, I’m jogging down the dock in flip flops, squealing overly-exuberant words of encouragement and praise like a goober at my duck-toddler as she spreads her wings and takes flight for the first time.

It's possible my eyes leaked a little.

At 10 weeks, Rose rules the roost. She preens Bear, demands to be held for her afternoon naps, requires an audience for bath time, and refuses to join us on walks — choosing instead to wait defiantly on the lifelines or bow pulpits of neighboring boats until we return. She prefers the comforts of air-conditioning, Netflix after dinner, and, true to her breed, whistles for me with preteen melodrama if I ask her to wait outside in the cockpit.

But a regular-sized duck who can fly is not — as some members of my family argued — a favorable addition to 180 square feet of already-shared-by-four-people common space. 

And thus, my longish moment of duck-mom glory came to an abrupt halt. 

Do not let the severity of my personal trauma in this moment lead you to believe Rose’s rehoming caused her any suffering in the least. Far from it. She now lives in an open-aired home in La Cruz with two humans, a pair of ducks, a few dogs, a rescued opossum, and a small green parrot. She instantly fell in love with her new mom, Kat — (science FTW, again) — and continues to wield her Needy-Duck power over her new kingdom with unbridled persistence. She’s living her best (domestic) life and is loved beyond compare.

The heading, Soul Crushing Trauma #2, doesn’t begin to adequately describe the deep, writhing, oxygen-sucking, blow that gutted us just days after our farewell to Rose.

On the evening of October 13th, after a valiant six-month battle with lymphoma, Bear died.

I want so badly to write that another way -- to say she left us, or we lost her, or to tell you she crossed the Rainbow Bridge -- but I just can't.    

There are words to describe the magnitude of this loss and the immensity of the planet-sized crater Bear’s absence has left in our lives, but I don’t have the emotional endurance to use them quite yet.

If you knew Bear, or you know us, you probably don’t need my words anyway. She deserves much more than I have the fortitude to offer right now, so I’m just gonna leave this one right here, raw and unfinished, until I do.

Finally, October the Destroyer is marching toward its god forsaken end. And, as we prepare to leave Ruby Vi and brace for yet another round of goodbyes, I’m spinning in a what-have-we-done vortex.

I’m wondering how two tear ducts produced enough salt water in a month to dehydrate a fully grown woman. I’m wondering what will become of my empty heartspace — of the vacancies left behind in the wake of goodbyes I was ill-prepared to make and barely strong enough to survive.

I'm wondering if any of it was worth any of it. 

It’s a ridiculous self-dialogue — debilitating at best, destructive at worst. My brain knows the way out, knows this heartache and doubt will pass. I know there’s much to look forward to in both our transition months ahead with family and friends and in our next big leap across the Atlantic. I know that the novelty of not-always-sweating and eggnog lattes and well-behaved toilets will carry my spirits on golden wings for at least a week and that hugging our people will set right what feels wrong these days. I’m sure I also know all the reasons these last few years of Boat Life were worth (almost) every sacrifice we made along the way.

What's the saying? Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees? Keep perspective. Focus on the big picture. Stay the course... 

Then again, the trees are the forest, aren’t they?

The laughter and friendships, the bliss and freedom often stood tall enough to shade the sadness and struggle. But a tree in the shade is no less a tree than one basking in the sunlight. The pain, the sacrifices, the losses, all the goddamn goodbyes are as much a part of our story as the endless stretches of soft white sand and cocktails in coconuts — they just aren’t as much fun to write about, or live through.

We’re only a couple of weeks away from the literal end of this figurative chapter and I keep thinking a big beautiful finish is the only appropriate way to mark such an occasion.

I'm a fool, obviously. 

The writer in me wants to control the narrative, to mess about with the jumble of words on the page the way Hudson does with a Rubik’s cube — just a few moments of effortless yet deliberate manipulation until, seemingly out of nowhere, all the chaos behaves in mesmerizingly precise patterns.

I want the last page to paint us a masterpiece, some tangible illustration of the Sailboat Magic we pulled from a tophat.

Of course that only works if you’re an actual writer who writes stories born from your own brain. It most definitely does not work if you’re me. I may be the one typing these paragraphs, but I am certainly not the author of this tale. At this point, trying to be is proving frustratingly futile. So I’m stuck riding out my tear-induced dehydration and bracing myself for more goodbyes ahead.

For the past few years, we’ve tried to keep relative focus on the big picture, on how the chapter reads as a whole. We’ve written off our proverbial (and my literal) typos as life’s lessons and tried to turn otherwise dull days into syndicated scenes we could at least laugh about later.

Only this time, I can’t seem to figure out how to turn words into daylight, how to brighten up these last few pages we’re slogging through in the dark. I’m trying to be ok with that, to just accept that sometimes chapters end without fanfare or plot resolution. After all, the end of an episode can croon a sad song just as easily as it can lay down a crowd pleasing Stones’ cover. As I trip and stumble my way through the melancholy, I’m straining to adjust my ears to the minor riff I hear rather than rewrite it to the four-chord progression I know by heart.

Even though right now it feels like the only one, this chapter is just that — a chapter. One of many in our life’s story.

(Hopefully, its anticlimactic ending when the mom cries, doesn't stain the earlier pages when she was clearly a pillar of controlled and stoic strength.) 

The challenge remains — how do we hold close the drone’s eye view of our forest while trekking the last mile on painfully solid ground? While we’re slogging our way across the homestretch of the damp and muddy forest floor, scrambling over errant roots beneath the shady shorties, what becomes of those dreamy hues of blues and greens and the liquid gold dripping from the perfect, sunshine-stealing treetops high above us?

And what happens in two weeks when we make it out of the woods? Undoubtedly, I’ll still be clutching a messy pile of words, all the feels, and half a mind to shape the lot of it into a Pulitzer. But what if I just set it all down instead? What if I let the run-on sentences and all the emotions just spill out haphazardly around us as we walk ourselves off the page? What if this time, we let the mess just be a mess: the gut-wrenching goodbyes, the maybes, the doubt, the broken hearts. What if we just leave the disaster wherever it falls and keep going?

Can we let the dark space punctuate this end? 

Or rather, is there any way we can't? 

Like my three-year-old nephew will tell you it’s best to do with bees, perhaps we just need to give October a little space.

As much as I loathed October, I’m still pretty curious to find out what happens in November — a glutton for punishment perhaps. But that’s the thing about a story — if you want to keep reading it, you have to be willing to turn the page.

So that’s that, I suppose — October the Cruel manages to bully its way into the chapter before it ends. (And, because 67 94% of my personality leans toward (slightly) controlling, I’ll pretend I had a choice in the matter.)

This month demanded we lose sight of the forest and stop to actually stare at the trees.

It forced us to wade thru the muck, the decay, the shadows — to shift our attention away from the master plan and really get down and dirty with the minutia.

Turns out, there is some gnarly sh!t going on down here at ground level.  

Blessedly, there are some glimmers of hope beginning to appear on our horizon: my mom’s first visit to Ruby Vi, a week’s staycation at the ocean-side penthouse of generous friends, the early arrival of a couple of college acceptance letters for Wyatt… A bit of light at the end of this tunnel of trees?

I doubt I’ll be able to convince myself that messy endings are a fine way to close a chapter, or that the view from the top isn’t one worth continually striving for, but at least this walkabout in the dank and dreary woods doesn’t seem to have fully destroyed us (yet), despite its absurdly dedicated attempts.

Now’s about the time when I like to swaddle a post in a comfy, feel-good blankie and return it safely to our usual cruising altitude and the glossy view from above.

But, begrudgingly, we still have a few more miles to trek down here before the we clear the thicket: more goodbyes, more last times, more tear duct management. It won’t be a photo-finish as we emerge from the tree line — neither perfectly timed plot twist nor crescendo of rising action will carry us into the next chapter.

We'll turn the page anyway.

I hope eventually we’ll be willing to look back, past my wake of unwritten words, beyond where our muddy footprints finally emerged from the darkness. I hope we’ll muster the courage to peer beneath the sunny canopy until our eyes adjust to the tangled jungle of shadows it hides. Maybe then, we’ll begin to reclaim a little of what October stole.

Maybe the massive chunk of our hearts it ripped out and callously tossed aside, will — like everything else on the forest floor — reinvent itself as something new.

In time, maybe we’ll find it growing as a memory — of sweet Bear rolling in a shady patch of green after a long and important shift on iguana-watch, or perhaps of Rose’s formidable whistle, reminding us, and the world, that she’s the one running the show.

Until then, we’ll keep walking towards the sunshine, tossing aside words, feeling the feels, and doing our best to ignore the ever-expanding mess as we go.

When he’s older, I’ll have to remember to thank my favorite little beekeeping toddler for his sage advice.

Because, like his honeybees, I think our own October Swarm (and its excruciatingly sharp stingers) just needs a little space.

For Bear and Tuga Lou and those who loved them so