Aloha, tristesse **
This is a post I meant to write in early January. File under “sad synchronicity” and “strangers on a beach.”
My family went to the Big Island in Hawaii for the week between Christmas and New Years. I was in a funk, as I often am at the holidays, raw and exhausted and not in the mood for the long bouts of family time in a car required to see the natural beauty of the Big Island. I wrote about my general grouchiness and holiday malaise here, here, and here, and hope by doing so I have exorcised some of the preemptive dread for this year.
By the time New Years Eve rolled around, I was in better spirits. The beaches and hotels were crawling with people I recognized slightly from Los Angeles and others whose accents and teenage kids’ school sweatshirts gave them away as New Yorkers. We’d just spent the day at the beach with old friends, and the week on the island had finally begun to chip away at the jagged edge I’d brought with me from Los Angeles. My husband and I hadn’t planned ahead for New Years’ Eve dinner. But we lucked out and found a table for four at a casual spot near the beach. I remembered just around sunset that I still hadn’t given a single moment of solemn remembrance to my father, whose yahrzeit (death anniversary) is December 25. All week, in my stubborn ill humor, I’d planned on a dedicated moment after one of my runs on the beach, or after dinner with my family. But I couldn’t or wouldn’t remember to do it. New Years’ Eve seemed like the last moment to stroll alone and give some thought to my father, who died in Taiwan on Christmas in 2000.
I walked alone on the beach and saw that someone had written the message in the photo above with white beach rocks. As I was staring at it, trying to commune with the sound of the waves, the sunset, the imminent new year or whatever I could summon to inject some sort of appropriate feeling into me, I looked up and saw a woman I thought I recognized from the gym in LA. She was walking alone and didn’t look particularly friendly. I both wanted and did not want to be distracted from the task of thinking deep thoughts about my father. On impulse, I called out to her. Once we began talking, she smiled and became familiar. We tried to figure out exactly how we knew each other and who we knew in common.
Then, as if following a script of how not to keep feelings to myself, I said, “I’m out here trying to have some kind of moment thinking about my father, whose yahrzeit was a few days ago.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” she said, eyes wide at the weird synchronicity. “Only, it’s not my father, it’s my husband.”
She went on to say that she only had a few minutes before she picked up her kids from their day camp, and it was the first time she had to do this, some kind of ritual yahrzeit mourning. He’d died exactly a year earlier, on New Years Eve. So she wanted to be alone for a few minutes before assuming the role of mother who leads the children in mourning their too-recently-dead father. She asked me what I would do in her situation, and I said, truthfully, that I had no idea. Probably some version of what she was doing: take my kids somewhere where the sun would provide enough warmth and anesthesia to endure the holiday, order a yahrzeit candle on Amazon to be delivered to my hotel, fake it til I made it.
That really put my whiny, foot-dragging, resentful 12-year-old bereavement in perspective, and I think I told her so. And I excused myself and returned to my family, somewhat more grateful for them than I had been an hour earlier. Perhaps a little more ready to move on. The next day my family and I went on what ended up being a harrowing boat ride in high surf. It was supposed to be a “fun” dolphin watch cruise, but ended up being a four-hour-long battle with the self not to cry or vomit in front of a bunch of strangers (many of whom were crying and vomiting). Coupled with the chance meeting with a fellow mourner the night before, the boat trip felt like just the complementary, physical shakabuku I needed to knock me out of my stagnant state.*
* but sadly, my kids and husband were doing just fine without the New Years Day dose of four hours of fear and intense nausea
** Aloha means more than just hello and goodbye, according to Wikipedia
