A Winter Return to Weekapaug

To stand just so on the beach at Weekapaug, Rhode Island, and look a little to the left of Block Island’s thin northern shoulder, some 12 miles off to the southeast, is to stare directly into the Atlantic void. The next land mass on that heading would be the Moroccan coast. More to the east, Nantucket Island and Martha’s Vineyard are stowed away just beyond the horizon, and a little farther still, Cape Cod.

I need to feel small this morning. This will work nicely. There is one of my clan I must remember.

***

I was here for sunrise only three months ago, in early October. The impulse to return has been strong in the days leading up to my arriving, almost as if I’d been summoned. Mostly, it feels like I’m being obedient — or, more softly, allowing.

Winter sand feels different underfoot — quite firm, unyielding. I step lightly atop the sand, leaving shallow footprints, and the walking is easy. Gone is its summer fluff and the labor of pushing through it. The contour of the beach is much smoother as well — the way it slopes down from the line of grasses to the water’s edge. During the warmer seasons, it descends toward the waves in well-defined undulations, in muscular cuts. I reason this smoothing is owing to the harsh action of winter’s wind and an absence of foot traffic.

***

I search up and down the beach. I am absolutely alone here.

Small.

***

The sky is clear seaward, but over the land to the northeast, there is a stand of aimless-looking clouds, the apparent sole purpose of which is to reflect the glancing, soft scarlet tones of the unrisen sun. A waning crescent moon is hovering high to the south. There is a light breeze running along the beach from the west. There is also a poverty of gulls, of any kind of shorebirds. The tide is ebbing, two hours after slack high — might somehow account for the lack of birds.

The Atlantic swells are meeting the sand as two-to-three foot waves, about seven seconds apart — easy going waves, maybe even all the way from Morocco. Just about everything in the sensate world arrives in waves. It’s all peaks and troughs...both are needed to make it work. Ask grief. It knows much about arriving in waves.

The sun leaks up through the horizon. No fanfare. No backlit clouds. It rises precisely out of my reference point for the open Atlantic. What is mesmerizing, though, is its burnished reflection in the backwash of the waves, on glistening sand after most of the water returns. I take numerous photos of this. None of them work. It blinds the camera...this return.

***

There is one missing now from the circle of my chosen family. I’d written on these pages of his wife’s funeral last April. He was frail then, and in the time since, had, of course, diminished further in her absence. She had become his reason. As is often the case with those drifting off, there had been a rally of sorts near the end — on Christmas, of all days — around a large table, in wonderful company, with laughter and many shared memories and a heaping portion of time’s passage. We could easily have seen it coming. I think we all did.

We gathered in the alcove of the mausoleum as we had in April, with the same priest, the same rote delivery of words out of the same worn book of prayers. Again, we each placed single roses on the casket as some music played, and even though it was only days ago, I can’t for the life of me remember the song.

What I can always manage to remember, though, is kindness, compassion, and grace offered in the service of deep friendship. In fact, I find examples of this to be unforgettable.

During the social time afterward as we lingered near the casket, I was introduced to someone who apparently was there to support her friend who is the one of my chosen family closest to the deceased. We chatted all too briefly about an exotic trip they’d once taken together. It was an utterly delightful and uplifting encounter. I’d have never known there was something on her heart. It wasn’t until after she left that I found out she was on her way to visit another grave, that it was the death anniversary of her husband. Hearts really do break wide open.

***

I feel like a fleck of life, alone on this beach before the ocean. It compounds my lingering humility in the face of the only type of death loss I have not known. It is one I will be unlikely to ever know, and the one I wonder about the most. I’ve heard it said that grief is love itself. If this is as true as I’ve found it to be, then truth must hold up to its opposite — that love is grief. To enter into a relationship for an entire parenthesis of life is to make certain that there will one day be grief — at the loss of not only a partner who has been close as breath, but an entire way of living. Yet we do this anyway. Willingly. Joyfully. Wholeheartedly.

My God, but that’s magnificent. Praise be.

For all who love and all who grieve. For all of us. From the edge of the world.

Peace,

Stephen