LIFE

August 14, 2006 4:04 am

There are so many things that have gone awry in my life… I need the Lord to show up in so many ways. Apparently, He wants to deal with one thing at a time. Of the many things that He wants full access to – and the thing I most want to give Him – is my heart. There is so much hidden there, hurting and desperate for Him.

I came to this place with a lot of expectation. He is excruciatingly slow in working things out in my heart and mind. The most focus and emotion has centered on my dad, so that is where we have to begin.

I want to tell you a story. It’s not a woe-is-me tale, and it’s not fiction. This is part of the story of my life, up to this point, although I believe there is more to this particular chapter – much more. I’ll tell you what I know as of tonight, but to do that, I have to bring you back to my childhood.

Author’s note – I am telling you facts – if they seem cold, it’s because dealing with facts has become one of my coping mechanisms – that and sarcasm... The Lord is dealing with that.

Ready? I’m not sure if I am either, but here goes… this has been a long time coming. 16 years, almost, but I’m getting ahead of the story…

I grew up spending my summers in south Florida. Every summer, my mom and dad and us 2 girls would load up entirely too much stuff into our station wagon, hitch up the boat, and off we’d go on a 3 week vacation. We’d wind our way south through Florida, stopping at out-of-the-way places like Wickeewatchee to watch live mermaids and Wakulla Springs to hold hands with some brave boy to jump off a diving platform into the crystal clear and icy cold water 15’ below. Of course, we’d do the Disney thing, and the Busch Garden thing – glass bottom boats are the bomb – and we’d go to really cool places like Tarpon Springs and the Everglades and – how cool is this – to Venice Beach to search for shark’s teeth. Of course, the ultimate destination was always the Keys – Marathon, to be exact. As much as we loved the cool stops along the way, we could not wait to get to the Blue Waters Motel on Marathon Key. We’d unhook the boat (I was always daddy’s little girl and could pretty much handle a 21’ boat by age 9 or so) as soon as we got there. Then came the traditional first night’s swim in the pool with Dad, and then we’d be on the water at first light.

There are so many memories, like a night-blooming cactus and flip-flops melting on the blazing hot asphalt, striped butts from tanning through swimsuits and holding my breath as long as I could underwater in the pool, but most of them center around the ocean. My dad was an avid fisherman, and being daddy’s little girl, so was I. We were also avid divers. The coral reefs were places of high adventure and close calls – from almost drowning to near misses with sharks and barracudas, to great fishing and phosphorescent algae glowing behind the boat at night. To say that I loved it there doesn’t even come close. I was at home there. I belonged. I’d sit alone at the end of the jetties late at night, watching the stars falling, in awe of the world and all that life had to offer.

Fast-forward to the summer of 1990. I was 17 and a real pain in the ass to my parents. We deviated that year, going on a road trip to the Rockies instead of going to the Keys. Both my sister and I were typical teenagers – boy-crazy, not so parent-crazy, and independent to a fault. The trip, although strewn with beautiful memories, was, by far and large, a huge disaster. My sister and I couldn’t wait to get home to our boyfriends, and my parent’s couldn’t wait to get away from us. Oh, did I mention that my sister had a baby in April of 1989? So, in addition to me and my sister’s complete disinvolvement, we had a toddler along for a 3 week road trip. It was not much fun – for any of us.

In the midst of all this turmoil, my dad, for reasons still unclear to me, had become very unhappy with his work as a photographer for the paper. He used to cover the LSU games, squatting on the sidelines, taking incredible shots of the Tigers in all their glory. Well, he was in an accident one day; as a passenger, he saw it coming and responded instinctively by trying to hit the non-existent brake. He broke every bone in his left foot, and was unable to cover the games anymore. He did special features on local chefs, local coverage, stuff like that, but eventually became very unhappy with changes within himself and his work environment. He decided to retire that year to become a freelance photographer. His idea was to cover the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the new world by tracing his voyage through the Bahamas and Bermuda. The idea was to publish a photographic documentary in 1992, and to begin a career as a freelance photographer.

So, in late November 1990, he left for our fishing camp in Mississippi to get all his gear and the boat ready for the trip. I was supposed to meet up with him, having gotten special permission from school to go with him. A week or so later, a friend and I went to the camp, hoping to catch up with him to finalize plans for me to meet him in Florida. We missed him. I wrote him a note, on the off-chance that he would return prior to heading on to Florida – that will become more relevant as the story unfolds. On December 7, he called home, looking for me. I was not there – I had gotten into a fight with my boyfriend and was late getting home that night. That was the last time we heard from him.

On December 13, my mom’s birthday, he did not call. I began calling one Coast Guard office after another, trying to get to the “appropriate” office to report him missing. My mom and sister were either in denial or paralyzed – I’m not sure which, but I took charge and gave many an agency hell, trying to convince them of his expert boatmanship, his familial responsibility and love for his wife – all of which pointed to something having gone terribly wrong. (You think I’m passionate and bold now – you should have known me back then – it was pretty crazy.) We finally got in touch with the Coast Guard in Broward County, and were told we reported him missing too late – that the search area was too large to hold any realistic expectation of finding him. They found his truck and trailer, but no one who actually saw him leave in the boat. He never checked into customs at Bimini, the closest island in the Bahamas to the US mainland. They traced his credit card activity and his traveler’s checks – and froze my mom’s assets. (“Standard procedure during an investigation, Ma’am…” – this as she tries to continue to pay bills and feed her family while her husband is lost at sea…) I even went as far as calling Unsolved Mysteries – it was in its prime back then – to ask them how long it would take to air the story. I was told 3 weeks, minimum – I hung up, telling them that 3 weeks was too long to wait for answers – that he needed help right away. In my mind, he was somewhere, waiting desperately for us to do something, to find him. Little did I know that I would be sitting here tonight, still battling this loss, 16 years later…

Suffice it to say, it was a rough time. From the very beginning, they gave us no hope of finding him alive. The story broke in Baton Rouge, and theories ran the gamut from him being a victim of piracy (those were the Miami Vice days – cigarette boats and drug running and all that) to him fulfilling his oft-repeated quip, “One of these days, I’m going fishing and I’m not coming back.” A local political figure – one of dad’s friends – actually flew down there and searched the deserted islands for any sign of life. Nothing. We hired a private investigator for as long as we could afford him – about a year – nothing. More good news – the boat he was in was made the year before they began lining the insides with foam, so the hull would float in case the vessel capsized, which meant that there was no hope of finding the boat if he had actually gone under. And then we were hit with the series of clinchers that broke my mom and formed my resolve to find out what happened – first, the Coast Guard’s official position is that the trip between Dania (just north of Ft. Lauderdale) to Bimini in a 21’ outboard is impossible. Oh, really? I’ve personally made that trip 3 times before the age of 16. Then Dr. Huh, a family friend and a great man, did some meteorological investigation. According to his findings, on the estimated day of departure, December 9, and the estimated time of departure, along with the speed of the Gulf Stream and other climatological evidence, he concluded that my dad would have made it half-way to Bimini before encountering a frontal system. The assumption was made that he tried to turn around to avoid the storm and was swamped by a wave (which is total crap – NO experienced boatman would have turned around in a storm – you have to keep the bow to the waves or you’ll be swamped.) We eventually had to have him declared legally dead – lost at sea - in order for my mom’s assets to be unfrozen so that we could continue to eat. To add insult to injury, my mom had to sell my dad’s gun collection while all this was going on so that we could survive – being taken advantage of in a crisis of that magnitude is… nauseating. Oh, and the IRS helped tremendously – they imposed full penalty for Mom cashing in their CD’s and IRA’s to catch up on bills – capital gains, early withdrawal penalties and all that… disgusting, absolutely disgusting.

There’s more – much more – but you get the gist of the story. As time passed, I would return to the camp and add another message to the note left so long ago – stuff life, “Dad, I miss you. Please come home.” “Dad, where are you? Please don’t leave us. Please come home.” You get the idea. Eventually, you cope as best you can, and you decide in your mind what happened. As his daughters, my sister and I believe he is still alive and fishing somewhere. It is my life’s goal to find out what happened. As his wife (and having been a wife, I hold a better appreciation for what she went through), my mom believes that he is dead. Better that than believing that he abandoned her and their children. We each coped in our own way, and life moved on. Kind of.

Fast-forward again to August 2006. Here I am, in Florida, fighting a love-hate relationship with the Atlantic Ocean. The first 3 times I went to the beach, I broke. Angry and sobbing, and still trying to love the Lord and keep my heart open to Him, I confronted my grief head on. Then something crazy happened. I went to the beach yesterday, and the place was absolutely teeming with life. Beaches are usually (sorry to be brutally honest) littered with dead things – shells that were once homes to creatures, dead fish, dead jellyfish, dead seaweed, etc. Not this time.

I wandered for a couple of miles, looking for shark’s teeth, and slowly began to look around. I was astounded to see life all around me. Birds of all kinds – sanderlings, willets, sea gulls, pelicans – a starfish, thousands of mollusk-like shellfish burrowing into the sand after every wave, sand fleas, minnows swimming back to sea after being washed up by the waves, dogs, horses, children playing, people smiling and laughing – life was everywhere.

Something shifted inside my heart. A place that has represented death, bitterness and loss to me for 16 years now teemed with Life.