“Taken by the sea he so loved.” These are the bittersweet words inscribed on my late husband’s tombstone.
Nic was a born seaman and thrived the most when he was either on or below the ocean. He had a scuba diving business taking dive tourists to some of the most beautiful underwater sites off the West Cork coast. I can still recall how the light quite literally danced in his eyes whenever he readied the boat for yet another day at sea. On the ocean he was completely in his element.
I was no stranger to the sea myself, having been born into a family that had lived for some years upon the ocean waves. We had a ships chandlers providing equipment to the local fishing fleet. Growing up, the sea was my childhood playground. At 5, when many children were teetering around on bikes without trainer wheels, or learning the art of tying shoelaces, I was already able to row my little boat out into the harbor to catch my own fish. Like Nic, I was at completely home in my watery world.
Nic and I met when he brought his boat into the harbor and entered the pier side café I owned at the time. Our relationship blossomed through our shared passion for being on or below the water. The ocean became our life. We earned a living from it, we bathed in it; we ate from it, and hand in hand, we dived her depths. An idyllic life for a young couple setting up a future together.
It was only pregnancy that kept me from diving on that fateful evening in July 1998 when Nic failed to return from a routine dive. Instead, I piloted our vessel. We anchored just above the Kowloon Bridge, Europe’s largest shipwreck, and I watched Nic enter the water with the familiar backwards roll. It was a routine dive; one he could have done with his eyes shut. Sitting in the warm evening sun I waited patiently for him to resurface. He never did. Shortly after Nic left the boat his state-of-the-art scuba equipment had malfunctioned leading him to fall unconscious some 36 meters deep below me. The events that followed that night will remain etched in my mind for as long as I shall live.
Newly widowed and setting out on the path to motherhood alone, I was shattered. I found it almost impossible to take in the truth that Nic was gone. How could he not be here any longer? A freak accident. Something you read about in the newspapers that’s someone else’s story, and now I was suddenly part of those headlines. Hollowed out emotionally, I tried desperately to make sense of what had happened in my life. It was like an emotional bomb had gone off and the reverberations were being felt in every corner of my existence.
When dawn broke that first morning without Nic, I cradled my swollen belly in stunned silence. I stared from my kitchen window down upon the watery element that had just taken him. In the early gloom, I could still feel his smiling presence. I remained there for hours trying to peer through the waves, trying to reach him. I imagined that somehow, he was in there still and if I tried hard enough, I could get to him and bring him back to me.
“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean” — Ryunosuke Santoro.
One might expect at that point I would develop a loathing for the sea, that I might turn my back on it. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I found I needed the water then more than ever. It was actually the ocean’s constant presence that saw me through the worst of my grief. Even though the sea had taken my husband, it still felt like a friend. So familiar and so close, I could walk her on her shores and be enveloped by her salty air, my tears witnessed by her as I worked to make solid the gaping holes left in my heart. With more time, I returned to bathe in her depths and, I relished being held by her cool buoyancy.
My daughter, our daughter, was born soon after Nic’s death. Giving birth alone was so difficult. What should have been cause for celebration only managed to fracture my world even further. I felt at times I couldn’t go on. And yet again, it was the ocean that managed to center me. Its comforting familiarity offered me the only consistency I could find. In the rise and fall of the tide, there was a rhythm to my life that made sense in a sad-sweet way. I like to think that the ocean served as my grief doula when I felt most lost. I could walk on her shores and feel as though I was connected to something. At least there was that. By then, for me, Nic had become one with the ocean and it was on her shores and in her depth where I felt him draw close to me and my little girl.
It took time, but I gradually returned to my old life on the waves and although I fought against it, life naturally began to grow in and around where the empty spaces had been. Against my wishes, I was becoming healed. The sound, the sights, the full-blooded experience of being on the ocean gradually pulled me from my deep misery and into noticing there was still beauty in my world, despite what I’d lost.
As the old saying goes “The sea gives, and the sea takes.”
The same held true for me. As months ran into years, it was on the ocean that the first chinks of joy began to creep back into my soul. I could not help but heal whilst the salty elements were reflecting the immediacy of life back at me. Those very same elements conspired to awaken my spirit, and gradually I felt myself unfurl from the tightness of grief. New life was edging its way slowly into my existence. The ocean was reminding me that I still had more to do and see. The distant voices from the past that whispered to me across the waves brought fresh ideas. I was waking up again. One day, whilst I was standing on the shore watching the horizon, it came to me that the greatest honor I could give Nic, and all those who had gone before, would be to choose to live again. To live most fully, and with all my heart, and that’s what I chose to do. I chose to live again.
I still feel the emotional reverberations from that tragic night some 24 years ago now. They continue to shape my life in many subtle ways. There are still times today when I need to step away from the life I have now, to catch my breath and to regroup. And when the occasional emotional storm arises and threatens to undo my healing work, it’s only by being on the seashore that I am able to reclaim my inner peace once more.
Rachel Gotto, who grew up in Glandore, West Cork, is a key-note speaker, life coach and clinical hypnotherapist based in County Galway. Her book about her life-threatening illness, beginning when her daughter Nicola was 6, “Flying on the Inside: A Memoir of Trauma and Recovery,” was published in December. For her recent essay about her daughter, click here. For her website, click here.
