Calling your name

Happy New Year.

It's been a while since I've posted - work, other writing commitments and holidays all seem to get in the way, but here is my response to one of the saddest and most moving news stories from 2014.

Background

Five-year-old Jack Dixon was swept away by a rouge wave on October 1^st 2014 while playing with his cousins in rock pools at Shelley Beach, Mt Maunganui. His cousins managed to scramble onto a rock and were rescued by Jack’s grandmother but she didn’t manage to save Jack. Searchers were hampered by big swells and wind gusts of 40 knots. His parents said they were lost by what had happened and just wanted Jack home. Candle-lit vigils were held on the beach in the evenings and the search for Jack’s body continued for five days.

On the Sunday 300 surfers and paddlers went out to the middle of Main Beach while several thousand people lined the shore. “Chanting Jack’s name, the surfers left flowers in the water while hundreds of others released balloons from the shore.” (Jamie Troughton, North and South, December 2014, p71)

(Please Note: all quotes in the text below are from the North and South article, Little Jack Lost: Diary of a Tragedy at Mt Maunganui.)

It’s easy for you to imagine little Jack crouched over his rock pool, absorbed, watching baby crabs, sun and salt water on his hair and skin – a tiny creature, playing on the water’s edge. Behind him, slabs of black rock glisten as waves surge and retreat. The wind picks up; the swell builds. The wave gathers strength – the mouth of the serpent yawns. 

The wave that took Jack “had its beginnings 4000km north-west. Tropical moisture began streaming south from the equator, fed by westerly winds blowing near Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.”  

You understand. Trouble starts a long way back and builds - travels through time and space, creates currents, simmers underground or builds tension in the air – hot and cold energies swirl and clash – storms build, trees crash into rivers, bridges fall, chunks of land are ripped out to sea. Sets of massive waves come into shore – and one wave, bigger than the rest, “poured through the channel up over the rocks onto the small shelly beach and engulfed the group.”

Against your will you imagine the moment the wave caught his delicate flesh, his bones still soft with childhood. You want the moment to be quick - one smack of his head against the black rock, his lungs flooded with water now he’s no longer a fish in the amniotic waters of the womb. And you see his small body floating on the grey-green swell like a white starfish, the current carrying him out to sea.

You don’t know this child, but listening to the story on the news you feel bereft and want to go searching for him - searching for the current, the swell, the wave that took him.  In your heart there’s an imaginary swimmer, one that wants to enter the ocean, face it down, find within its temper a patch of calm, clear water that moves like the gentlest of breaths, that holds in perfect rhythm the sleeping body of wee Jack, the starfish boy.

In reality you’re a hopeless swimmer, afraid to go out into the surf further than your knees. And on the day Jack was taken there was no calmness, no clarity. The winds had been brutal, the swells enormous, rescuers in black wetsuits and orange vests were pushed back, the rocks were covered in slippery foam. People walked the shoreline for days; they put candles and teddy bears in the sand. His body was never found.

Apart from the obvious - empathy for a lost child and for the anguish of his family – what is it about this story that affects you so much, that reaches out and hooks itself into you?  Is it because it’s a direct link to your most vivid and recurring nightmare: years of dreaming of a rogue wave, a giant wall of water washing the child you must protect out to sea?

In these dreams you walk with your child on the beach, watch her paddle, lift her to the rock pool so she can discover the mystery of a miniature world.  And in the space of a breath, just when your back is turned, the wave rises and surges and she slips from your hand and is gone. You wake unable to move, body rigid, heart jumping, breath jammed in your throat.

Trouble starts a long way off.  For Jack it started 4000km away, for you generations in the past. How far do you go back? How far do you follow the breadcrumb trail to its source? Great grandfather, grandmother, that rogue uncle. It’s their inheritance and yours: family secrets; family lies, family shame.  An upside down world - children protect adults and carry their burden of failure. Off shore winds drive the swell, the swell builds; disaster strikes and childhood is lost.

How is it possible to bear this loss? To walk the beach alone, to know you weren’t quick enough or strong enough to save the child. How do you accept you must bow before the power of such a wave, such a sea? And you know you must hold the space where the child should have been; that you’ll only keep them close by tracing the perimeters of your loss.

You realize this loss defines you, makes you dull, slow, tarnished, shameful, lost, lacking in some unseen yet essential quality, like not having enough oxygen in your blood. Those around you become impatient, frustrated, angry, bored. You are left with your hyper-vigilance, your silence, your on-going grief.

Feeling loss and feeling lost are connected: Jack’s parents’ said they felt lost when in fact it was Jack who was never found.  Grief is a dislocation, a loss of self as well as loss of the other, the loved one; a loss of the light that should be in the world, a loss of your right to call out your name to the world and be heard, and responded to.

The surfers and paddlers who went out into the bay once the rescue efforts had ceased chanted Jack’s name and threw flowers into the water. The simplicity of this so perfect, so expressive of what you do when someone is lost – you call out, hoping some part of them will hear you and call back. And even when they don’t respond, and the world doesn’t return anything to you, you keep calling, because you have to.

It now seems to you that your recurring nightmare is a version of that imaginary, mythical swimmer, paddling out, chanting your name, calling it so loudly it wakes you year after year, so you can claim a space for the child lost so long ago, but never forgotten, still out there somewhere, resting on the seabed, one more tiny starfish body longing to come ashore.



 Here is a link to the beautiful song, Calling My Children Home by Emmylou Harris.