The Tide, the Milky Way, You
1
The storm brings heavy rain and wind so strong the house shudders. The tide surges onto the road. Another record high. By morning seaweed and driftwood are strewn at the foot of the driveway. Pieces of shell blink in the sun. How can peril be so beautiful?
You may not remember storms like this—they are stronger now.
I used to tell you and Katie about when I was growing up in the 70s, seeing open shore after the ocean claimed another house built too close. Seawater would surround it; the house would break loose, topple, wash out. That still sometimes happens, though people build farther back than they used to. Climate change is bringing other urgencies more quickly than we’d thought, including fiercer and more frequent storms.
Yet some things remain unchanged from the time a few years ago that you came home for a month and we sat outside every night until the mosquitos found us (which they always did). The herons have arrived. The peepers are out. The grass emerged the same true green, although last night’s frost may set it back. Mid-April: the occasional nice day and lots of dreary ones—horizonless, water and sky a uniform gray. The mosquitos will come, but the newly hatched won’t figure out how to bite until June. Some nights the peepers sync up and sound like the earth inhaling, exhaling, inhaling.
That month you were here you worked at the table, editing tracks you’d recorded for clients. Hours on end you comped vocals, mixed, mastered—as absorbed as you’d been since childhood in any project that drew you in. (Projects that didn’t were another matter!) I was reminded of when you were 12 and spent a weekend writing out the bass tabs to The Wall. You’d leave your room for a sandwich, then head right back in.
Do you still have music?
I’m often home in this small place with the ocean too close and the wind fickle, keeping an eye out for the fox that sometimes comes at dusk. It’s easy to imagine your gear arranged in your room, a guitar propped against the bed. Easy to remember you coming inside from a walk, your warm brown eyes. Hey guys!
I was alone when the call came. It was Katie. Mom, she said. Mom. I knew. A Tuesday. You were supposed to come home for the weekend—you hadn’t been feeling well. Stress, you thought. On the phone the night before you’d wondered whether you might be having panic attacks. That afternoon you’d felt sweaty, dizzy. After a while I asked, tentatively, Are you sure it’s not cardiac? We both knew your history, of course. It’s not, you said. Don’t add medical anxiety to the mix, Mom.
Medical anxiety—I understood, oh I did. Okay, I said. We talked a while longer. You were eating a carrot, you said. Later you were planning to order takeout and watch a movie.
We don’t use the word ‘died.’ We say went. We say gone. We say, After Erik. Thirty years old. You were in Bronxville sanding the hull of your boat. It was 10:30 in the morning.
The call came, and Katie’s voice. I went outside, took the geraniums I’d just bought out of the car and left them on the ground. Got into the car, backed down the driveway. It was the end of May but winter and winter and nothing. Those early minutes before the agony: a pendent whiteness.
What happened next. The trip down to New York with Katie and the rest of the family. The morgue, the mortuary in Queens where somehow we arranged cremation. Your apartment, the small stone Buddha on your nightstand, the T-shirt that held your scent. I don’t talk about these much.
Here’s something you may not know. Our third day there Aunt Jill, Katie and I were caught in a shoot-out. Police cruisers cut us off and cornered our car. Officers got out with their guns drawn. Another car came around the corner, fast. There were five shots. We didn’t see much; we were bent low against the seats. Then it was quiet. When we sat up again, the cruisers and the other car were gone. While it was happening, I thought: My daughter, my daughter.And when it was over: My son.
My biggest fear is forgetting. I spend hours listening to your voicemails and watching videos. Rereading a thousand texts. A long time ago you went into my phone contacts and changed your name from Erik to ErikMyFavoriteLittleBoy. I’m struck down every time I see it. You were, you are. Beloved. Grief is synonymous with hunger.
2
I think a lot about your music. You took to it early and stayed with it: piano, electric bass and guitar, vocals, djembe and the upright bass. Your piano teacher said you had talent, but also you practiced a lot (not always cheerfully). You did it sometimes at my urging then, eventually, on your own—and it grew into something real and good. The music you made, studio you built, artists whose music you produced: a community. Your single-mindedness carried you. I’ve been able to find some gratitude for that.
Though I was upset when a colleague with two sons said, meaning comfort, ‘At least he lived his life.’
A Japanese friend told me about her belief that the spirits of the dead settle into those left behind, deepening their understanding of the world. Will this happen to Katie and your dad and me? Something else: after a Shinto cremation the family tends to the remains. Starting with the feet, they lift the bone fragments and ashes of their loved one with chopsticks and place them in an urn. Head and shoulder fragments go in last, so the remains are upright. The thought of mobility comforts me.
Sometimes we feel your presence. The first visitation: two weeks after you went. Katie and your stepdad and I were in the woods. Look, Flip said, a hawk. Only it wasn’t a hawk when I looked up, it was an owl, and it flew over our heads and landed in the tree beside us. Mid-day—I’d never seen an owl so close, that perfect, radiant head. He flew forward, waited. We walked to him. He flew forward again, waited. In those early after-days I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat or shower. But we walked with the owl, the three of us did.
Usually you took the bus when you came home, but the summer you stayed a month you’d sailed up from New York on the boat you were rehabbing. You’d bought it for next to nothing, and it needed work. You dealt with the mechanical stuff before you headed north; now you were rehabbing the interior. (That you knew how to do such things amazed me. The first time you took me out in the boat we’d sailed into the East River and down along Manhattan; I was tearful that day thinking about you grown and competent.)
In Maine you said how good it felt to be in the cove working on the boat or sitting outside at night in the piney air. We talked about seal sightings, shellfish beds, the strange fact that Pluto was no longer a planet. Once we discussed the squirrel nest in the yard and whether squirrels dream. You thought they did; I wasn’t sure.
In the evenings you sometimes used to pause while you were talking and say Another one, by which you meant a falling star. Another one. I’d tilt my head up and wait for the next.
Remember the tide clock you hung where the regular clock had been? I’d taken that one down because it ticked so loudly. Your first day home, you hung the tide clock in its place. It’s still there—I like keeping track this way. At high tide a crow shows up for his daily bath; newly ebbing is when the fishing’s best. A tidal day is 24 hours, 50 minutes though, so we’re out of sync with regular time.
Do you remember throwing rocks into the cove one night? You’d had a bad day—spent hours patching your boat’s water tank, then it broke again. I cried a little, Mom, you said. I felt bad. I wanted to fix it. Always, I wanted to fix it.
That summer Katie and I swam in the ocean, but you wouldn’t. Liquid ice, you told us. You won’t feel it once you’re numb, I said, yet you stayed on shore until one day you dove in and came up whooping. You swam for five minutes, laughing the whole time. That laugh: it always anchored you and whoever was with you to the moment.
I haven’t smiled much these past four years. When I do, my face feels strange.
The evening you tossed those rocks, the moonlight on the surface broke then reformed. That upset was a one-off, though. Mostly the nights were without incident. The sun would finish setting, stars would emerge. It was easy like that.
Night, you said, was when you felt most yourself. I told you I felt like that too, and so had Grandpa. Olga Tokarczuk says nighttime gives the world back its natural, original appearance, without sugar-coating it. Katie says staying up until 3 a.m. is a trauma response. Maybe both are true.
That Shinto cremation ritual. There were no bone fragments in your remains. They weren’t heavy, 6 pounds and 8 ounces—close to what you weighed at birth.
3
A few days after the storm, I’m sitting on the porch steps at dusk when the fox trots through the yard. She side-eyes me, keeps going. This has always been her place more than any human’s.
Our little house sits 60 feet from the water. More and more it seems the ocean may come for it. The tide flows, ebbs, flows each year a little higher. We’re pretty much level with the seals and sea bass now.
Do the seals and the fish sense what’s happening? What about the ocean?
Robin Wall Kimmerer says land and water are animate. So too other natural things: the wind, a pinecone, fire. In Potawatomi, the language spoken by Kimmerer’s ancestors, one asks of a manmade object, What is it? But of a river one says, Who is that being?
Who is that being. Remember your rock collection—quartz, bits of tourmaline, the beryl you found in slag when you were nine? Animate—I wonder if you ever felt a rock hum in your hand, the way I did when I was a kid. I wish I’d asked. You loved rocks, you even swiped some of mine. When we gathered in your apartment after the cremation, I found my egg-shaped granite on your table. It belonged there, not here on a shelf again.
A month after the owl, the first seven-legged spider showed up, on my laptop screen. I moved it to the window sill, though soon it was back. That night it was on my pillow. I took a photo, put the spider in the hallway. The next morning it was in the tub. This time I got closer with my camera. The spider stayed put—a life force. I went online. Seven-legged spider: symbol of perfection and completeness.
For several weeks, every spider I saw had seven legs. A white one on my windshield; daddy longlegs on the front door; a spider that climbed onto the sofa while we watched TV. Then they stopped coming, a loss, though part of me sensed they hadn’t really left.
People might say I imagined, no, induced meaning in these things. Before, if they’d happened to someone else, I might have thought that too.
Wherever you’ve gone, I wonder if something of Grandpa is there. The two of you had a great relationship. Those summer days when you were little—both of you in cargo shorts, going off to fish. You never caught much, but you ate a lot of sundaes. I wish Grandpa had lived to see this place. He would have liked it, don’t you think? Though we’re still not any good at catching fish.
A while ago I downloaded some photos of you at the studio: you and your partner Paul at the mixing console; Brooklyn Bri rapping while you record her; you with The Chainsmokers after a session. You look happy in these pictures, in your place. I hope Grandpa knows about the life you made.
You were right, by the way, about the squirrels. I looked it up one night. They do dream.
4
I’ve begun leaving the lamps off at dusk and letting dark come. The gloaming, an hour neither here nor there. If no one else is home, I sit through it. Then the deep blue is gone, Orion stretched out overhead, and I get up to figure out dinner.
Since you went, I stay up later than ever. Flip goes to bed, Katie, then it’s the cat and me. Usually I write for a while. After that an online dive into something I’m working on or, better, something I’m not. Spirals, bats, Clara Schumann, Roberta Flack. I listen to a lot of music. Sometimes I sing along to praise worship, mostly old Hillsong. Often I listen to music you made—albums you recorded with Paul, with you on bass and vocals; an Ariana Grande remix you did. I like the early Brooklyn Bri mixtapes, hearing her transform from teen to self-assured adult.
The visitations I mentioned: there are others. Sometimes when I’m in the car with the radio on, the singer sounds exactly like you. While it lasts, the resemblance is astounding—you are in the car with me. I cry, then sometimes I laugh. Four years in: the sadness is a little more bearable knowing joy can follow. And always when I laugh now, I feel tears not far away. This link between sadness and joy, I’m not sure what to make of it.
Around midnight I often go sit out on the steps. Grief can do this too, make you seek the cold and the unknown. It can make you less afraid. Occasionally I sense an animal presence on the edge of the woods, a large crunching over twigs. It knows I’m there. Pauses. Breathes. Whoever the being, it has a whole life in the dark.
I feel little fear now because nothing worse can happen. You were unafraid for a different reason. During that resuscitation when you were a baby, the doctors lost you twice. But both times you came back. Afterwards I could sense you had changed. A friend said you’d been dipped in the beyond, which felt true. You’d seen the other side—and you were okay with it. At five you told Grammie, I’m not from here, you know. I’m from a nice place far away, but I’ll be here for a while.
What I mean is, you spent little time on worry. Freedom from worry allowed you to believe you could build a music studio one piece of equipment at a time. It led you out to open ocean in the boat you rehabbed. Faith, it gave you faith. Or maybe it was the other way around.
A couple times a week, I’m still up when the workboats ready to go out. The crew on one of them plays metal, not loudly because some of the neighbors complained to the harbormaster a while back. I open the window, listen. It lifts me—the fishermen headed east with hot coffee in their Yetis. I always think of you.
Grief is a companion now, the stages not linear but swapping in and out at will. The closest I come to what they call acceptance is 4:00 a.m. in the thinning dark.
Eight months after you went, Covid arrived. For a while the isolation was a relief. We didn’t have to push to get out, see people, do things. Katie and Flip and I focused on staying grounded. On walking with the owl.
Covid is part of daily life now, but the world still feels fraught—everywhere imperiled. There was another school shooting this week. Six dead. Elementary students are trained how to respond to an active shooter. At home, parents go over the instructions with their kids. Do you know about the shark attack? Eight miles from here—a woman swimming with her daughter. The shark came from below, the woman died in the water. There are more sharks now, farther north, earlier in the summer. Climate change: I fear for people, I fear for the sharks. Katie and I still swim but not with the same assurance. The nearby beach has installed bleeding kits.
I wonder what you make of wildfires burning uncontrolled while the polar ice caps melt. Floods, tornadoes, dried-up lakes. It’s hard not to think Nature has finally had enough of humans, who have come to outnumber 10-1 all non-human mammals larger than a mouse.
Will birds stop returning to the cove in spring? Sometimes anything seems possible on this grievously compromised earth.
5
At the celebration of your life, I told the story of picking you up at pre-school one day and asking about your morning. Good, you said, except that J. threw sand in your eyes. I felt an upwelling of upset, but in the rearview mirror your face was placid. I hope he has a better day tomorrow, you said. I like playing with him. In my mind, that’s how I remember you reacting through to adulthood.
Sanctification of those who’ve gone—I get it now. You could be difficult, though: moody, a little stubborn. Sometimes impulsive. You bit the ankle of another kid in second grade (But we were playing ‘dogs’!), balked at doing chores. Do you remember the time we were on vacation and you sneaked off at 1:00 a.m. to hang out with some kids you’d met? I do.
Still—I reheat my coffee every day in the microwave you gave me on a birthday. What do you really need, Mom? you’d asked. Think. Try to make it big. Finally I told you the on/off button on the microwave was sticking. That delighted you—two days later a new one showed up. All those caring gifts. The earrings you sent for that last Mother’s Day? They are beautiful. I bought a second pair, in case.
Sometimes after sunset I go down to the cove and throw rocks into the water. I do it to splinter the moonlight like you did when your water tank rebroke.
For so many years I kept telling myself it wouldn’t happen. You’d been the sickest baby in the ICU. Survived. You lived with scarring through your heart—but you were doing well, and you would stay that way. I became convinced.
That’s not really true. As time went on, I felt an uneasiness. No matter what I tried to tell myself.
How much did you sense what was coming?
Your doctors didn’t tell us anything had changed. Yet, you went to see so many people that final year—college classmates; high school friends; Bri in Atlanta after she moved; family in Maine. It was almost as though you felt an imperative. You’d send photos of those trips, and I saw—something. There’s the old joy in a few: at a friend’s birthday, with Katie on vacation. But in others you looked preoccupied, less than fully present. Others sensed it too. At your service Bri said you’d seemed pensive when you visited. She wondered, had you gone to say goodbye?
My heart aches when I think of you calling that last night and saying you weren’t feeling good and needed to come home that weekend. We talked for an hour.
There’s a Portuguese word I found, saudade. It means a state of profound yearning for something or someone, along with a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again. Maybe you felt it, the not-knowing and knowing. I think I did.
After you went, this house held my despair and anger, my disbelief. It still does. Thirty years! I feel angry about the future you should have had, the slow unfolding of a life. All my attempts at gratitude will never alter that.
6
And so it comes—another spring, this one wet and windy. Usually dawn is calm; these days howl themselves into being. One morning Flip and I wake to unexpected snow and a stillness inside the house that means the power’s out. Third time in two weeks. We have a wood stove now for backup, so at least there’s heat.
When we go out to split wood, the lengths cleave easily, which Grandpa once said has to do with the fibers freezing and expanding. A squirrel scolds the disruption of the peace. He’s claimed the one large deciduous tree in the woods, a maple that’s managed to hold its own among the pines. After a while, clumps of snow start dropping onto my neck. I know the squirrel didn’t throw them but—I set aside the ax to check. The squirrel glares down, unarmed. My mind roams to Aunt Jill’s family near Portland. How much snow did they get? Absently, I reach for the ax and nick my hand. Okay. A little blood.
The work it takes to exist here has grown to suit me. The necessity of focus leaves less time for rumination. If you’re not in the present, it will come and find you. The blood is a vivid red. Or: life reduced to the immediate is about all I can manage.
Inside, I tape gauze over the wound. Settle in for a day of rationing batteries and wood, wishing the flames swimming inside the glass would slow down. The next day is beautiful, the power back on. We open the windows to the fecund smell of the cove. The pansies planted over bedrock survived the snow, at least. That night we learn three more inches of rain are on the way, with gusts to 45.
When you began sailing, I downloaded weather apps to keep track of New York Harbor and Long Island Sound. You put up with my texting. Your dad, also a sailor, said you knew water and the weather. And storm after storm, you were safe, you were safe, you were safe. Our neighbor Sarge, who’s sailed for decades, watched you out on your boat one afternoon. Stood by his window with binoculars. Expert, he pronounced—and I relaxed a little.
Still, I think about you out on the ocean whenever we prepare for a storm. This time, we carry planters and furniture to the upper yard, away from high tide. Lay in food and water. Set out the candles. The storm arrives that night: a roar part wind, part water, along with sleeplessness imagining how things will look the morning. Eventually I give up and go outside to check. Still pouring, two inches of ponding in the crawl space. Ocean fierce. Road intact, but the creek on the side of the house is flooded, the culvert overflowing. I wade in, pull away branches near its mouth. They twist and snap, resist.
Back in bed it occurs we might have to start sandbagging the creek bank. Then I wonder, should we do that along the road to keep seawater from washing into the woods? Then: what would it be like not to have to do any of this? To live somewhere else. But I can’t really imagine it, partly because of how much you loved being here, your bedroom window always open.
Last week I put my feet in the ocean for the first time this spring and felt you near.
Sensing your spirit in this place has led me in turn to what feels like spirit in many things. Mary Graham talks about the Law of Obligation, the duty to honor our embeddedness in Nature, and its sanctity. The land is all there is, Graham says. She calls for what she terms autonomous regard in humans’ relationships with each other and with other animates—a mutuality based in part on respect for the wisdom in all beings. Outside with the maple and the pines, I’ve begun to wonder what they sense. They respire, drink, experience snowfall and the heat of the sun. More and more I value feeling over thinking. Credos and theories don’t explain enough or try to explain too much and fail. The land is all there is.
Human community— remember how Sarge showed up daily to consult while you rehabbed your boat? He was bereft when he learned what had happened. And the stoic couple from next door? They came into our yard weeping, arms filled with gladiolas, when we got back here. I’m grateful for our neighbors, our friends. And yet—relationship can be fraught now. After we lost you, we became the emblems of misfortune that remind others how lucky they are.
For a long time, it felt as though everything had ended. Sometimes it still does. A few months ago I took your bedding to the transfer station. You’d never really liked the print. As I walked into the swap shed, a woman approached and said she loved the pillows. I handed them to her. Cleaning out the kids’ rooms? she asked. I hesitated, said yes. She told me she’d kept all her grown son’s things, including his bike and Legos. He liked to see them when he went home. Desolation came over me. I wanted to sweep the folded clothes off the table. Wanted to get in my car and drive away. Scream.
It happens every day—reminders that someone else’s child is alive and you are not. In your final text to me you wrote, I’m feeling slightly better, baby steps. Looking forward to Friday! By Friday you’d been gone three days.
When I feel hollowed out, sometimes I watch the video of the first time your girlfriend Rachel’s puppy swam. It was taken not long before you went. You’re waist-high in the water, Rachel filming with her phone while Chief paddles toward you. Look at you! you say. You lean down and pat his head as he swims past then loops back to you. Look at you, only five months old! Your pride and delight are tangible. Watching that video I think, He knew about love.
7
I’ve developed a need to see as much of the sky as possible. One afternoon I row into the cove and lie back to watch clouds break and reform. Cold comes off the water. After a while I hear the thrum of an engine. I sit up—a fishing boat I haven’t seen before, pulling in to moor. The man at the helm is slim and brown-haired, like you.
Here’s another thing grief does, it leaves you in between, crossing over and back and over and back until—I used to believe human consciousness enabled understanding. Now I think it limits it.
Meanwhile, my Google searches are pragmatic. How to cook rhubarb. How long to boil water to prevent giardia. What to do to revive roots washed over by seawater.
I’ll do what I can to save this place, Erik. I will stay here, with the rising tide, the Milky Way, the constant trees. The possibility of you.
Your life—a visitation.
This is how I love you now: I wait. Spirit visits the bereft—or we notice it—because we’re in need of and open to what might be. When a song plays on the radio and the voice is not yours yet unmistakably yours, I’m as unsurprised as I am grateful. The owl, the seven-legged spiders—thank you for these.
Recently I’ve started seeing the numeral 333. It’s been happening for four months: on my phone, the bedroom clock, receipt—again and again. Someone told me it’s an ‘angel number’ associated with expansion.
Losing all illusion brings its own small comforts—you wind up with stretches of peace, occasional light. You still care about things, but more loosely. Is this a form of grace?
Last week at dawn I was by the window waiting for the workboats to go out. The one was playing metal—it might have been Black Sabbath. I almost missed her: the fox trotting down the road. I went outside and sat, in hopes she might come back. She didn’t. The day grew brighter. Birds shook the trees awake. A neighbor walked past with her dog, and he veered into the cove to take a dip.
Something about that video of you with Rachel’s puppy—the tone of your voice, the way you bent toward him. You seemed older than your years. Saudade. With joy, a sadness, a knowingness that magnifies the moment.
Four years, one month, eleven days. We live alongside the ache, your pulsing absence. We live with the hunger. Yet the liminal expands. I’ve added some rocks from your collection to the flower garden. They make a good border, and it seems right they’re outside with the elements. Sometimes I pick them up to feel whether they’ll hum. They haven’t yet, but they may.
CB Anderson‘s Blue Lion Days received the 2023 Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award and is forthcoming in 2024. Her collection River Talk was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2014. Works have appeared in Iowa Review, Narrative, Electric Lit, Fourth Genre, and Boston Magazine, among others. Visit her at cbanderson.net.