Four Years, and a Postscript of Lemonade

In Colleen’s later years, we acquired two big Rhodesian Ridgebacks. First Machupa, and then—since “Chupie” needed a playmate—Jengo. While “playmate” sounds like such a cute and childlike term, they grew into 200+ pounds of combined dog-weight. When the two would wrestle (as brothers always wrestle) you’d best stay out of their way. However, when spent from the tussle, they’d want to nap—just as close to you as they could ever possibly get.

In getting to know other Ridgeback owners, we started hearing an apt aphorism to describe the breed’s temperament: “Whoever said, ‘You can’t buy love.’ clearly hadn’t ever paid for a Ridgeback puppy.” Although the saying was overused it was true. All Machupa and Jengo ever wanted was for the pack to be united—forever. Whenever one of us would prepare to depart the house, they’d cock their heads quizzically as if to say, But we’re all together. Why in the world would you ever want to leave?

The Ridgebacks ended up outliving Colleen by several years and I was surprised at how unaffected by her death they appeared to be. Perhaps her lingering scent around the house let them down gently. Perhaps they grieved deeply but inwardly, knowing it was best for the pack for them to put on a good dog-face to the world. Perhaps with their liberated-from-words-intuitiveness they had some kind of premonition it was all going to happen. Who knows, maybe they operate on a whole other plane of awareness and our human demarcation of death is a rounding error in the calculus of canine.

In the months after her death my kids and I often surmised that if Colleen suddenly burst through the front door in her ebullient larger-than-life manner, while the dogs would have leapt from their beds to give her a big hello, they soon would have returned to their beds and their napping, thinking nothing was strange about her entrance.

In that trying time, I read a lot and talked to a lot of professionals about my loss. The one thing I heard consistently was, “You can’t put a timeline on grief.” It sounded like good advice and I’m sure it was. However, it was so oft-repeated that as soon as the book, online article, or expert would begin the sentence—the sentence with the inevitable ending—I’d chuckle because it reminded me of the Ridgeback joke about love not being for sale. I’d then feel bad about myself for suppressing a giggle while someone was trying to offer genuine help.

My solace to my sniggering lay in the runner-up in the oft-repeated-grief-advice contest: “Everybody grieves in their own way.” With that nugget in hand I could rationalize that my internal monologue that bordered on a stand-up comedy routine was just my way of dealing.

Still, not having any sort of timeline was difficult advice to accept. In my professional career, time was everything (consulting=billing rates, billing rates=time is money). Although I’m now unshackled from traditional timelines, in sailing you’ve always got an estimated time of arrival at a waypoint in mind and an estimate of when the next foul weather will roll in. Sure either might vary wildly (in the Mediterranean Hazel’s boat speed over ground frequently drops from five knots to half a knot in a couple minutes when the wind dies and the tide turns), but at least you’ve got an estimate in mind. In retrospect and worse yet for me (and even more painful to write), I enjoyed the early-stage grief. It was a way to remember, to not forget, it made me special, it was who I was.

However, I’m here to say today that despite all the verisimilitude of well-intentioned advice, I think the counsel about there being no timeline for grief is wrong (at least for me). Last August was the four-year anniversary of Colleen’s death. Sunny and I had just entered the windy Aegean Sea from the rather docile Ionian Sea and Rhett was back home for a month dealing with some medical things. While I can’t point to one watershed moment during those weeks of challenging sailing and solitude, I experienced an overall easing of the grip of grief.. And more to the fore, I was no longer afraid that in letting it go or leaving it in the past I’d somehow lose a part of me. I’m also happy to report that as I think forward to the fifth anniversary this coming August, I’m heartened that the positive trend I started to see last August has continued.

It’s not that the grief is gone, it’s that the grief has shifted. It’s as if I was sailing upwind in those first years—an arduous affair. Upwind, the boat’s speed into the “true wind” (the wind blowing over the water) increases the “apparent wind” that the mariner experiences and also the velocity of the bashing collisions between the wind-driven waves and the boat. It’s a foul wind and a head-sea. Conversely, when the wind shifts “abaft the beam” (to behind the boat), the experience is totally different. Sure, it can still be windy (very windy in fact) but the on-deck apparent wind is eased by the boat’s speed and the waves that were formerly bashing the bows push the hull forward in foamy surges—the embodiment of “fair winds and following seas.”

If the me of today could go back four years and say something to the me of then, it would be to politely ignore those offering the no-timeline-on-grief-advice. I’d add, “Don’t worry—the wind will continue to blow. You will will still be you and you will still sail, but at some point it will shift favorably. There is a timeline for your grief. You just don’t know it yet.”

Afterword: The other night Rhett and I were sharing meal in a quiet restaurant in the shadow of Mount Olympus in Macedonian Greece. (I know, I know…a beautiful dinner in a beautiful place with a beautiful woman…pinch me! ) I related to Rhett that for a while I had been thinking about the changing nature of grief and writing a post entitled “Four Years.” However, as we talked, my heart felt vice-gripped and my vision was clouded by tears. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time, it was like a rouge wave awkwardly crashing into our bow in an otherwise following sea.

Thanks as always to my Rhett. My navigator through these uncharted waters. If there’s anything I know, it’s that I wouldn’t now be sailing these generally fair winds and following seas without her love and wisdom.

---

PS: Lemonade

If you’ve been following the Hazel-tracker on our home page after our delayed launch this season, you may have noticed that we only sailed three days before taking a week’s break in the town of Chalkis on the Island of Evia. Both before and after Hazel’s launch, Poseidon gave us a few lemons, but we made some great lemonade.

First, before launch the work on Hazel took a bit longer than expected. With that extra time granted we were able to experience Orthodox Easter with our adopted Greek family in Athens, and also make a two-day trip to Meteora.

Then, midnight Easter Sunday (i.e., Saturday going into Sunday), the faithful gather in the church with the crowd spilling onto the church’s steps and courtyard. The sacred flame from the altar is spread candle-to-candle in hushed adoration by the congregation—family member to family member, stranger to stranger, it’s all the same. “Sacred flame” is no pretty figure of speech here, the altar’s light is a scion of the Holy Fire which was originally lit day before in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (the site of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection). After lighting in Jerusalem the flame is flown to Athens then distributed to Orthodox churches across Greece.

---

After our Orthodox Easter, we took an overnight coach tour (bus tour) to Meteora, the land of mountain-top monasteries…

If you’re a James Bond fan, enjoyed my connection to From Russia with Love in our Türkiye Trot blog post, and the Meteora monasteries look vaguely familiar…you’re probably thinking of the final scenes of For Your Eyes Only:

After our Orthodox Easter and trip to Meteora and around the time we splashed Hazel (as documented here), we noticed Sunny favoring and continually licking and gnawing on a forepaw. By the time we made our first port-of-call in Chalkis (three day-sails later), she was limping and in pain. Rhett took her to a vet and she was diagnosed with a deeply broken toenail (i.e., broken before the nail emerges from the skin). While it wasn’t serious if properly treated, if it had got infected it could start a whole series of bad things including a bone infection. The vet recommended letting it grow out for a week and then he could trim it and it would then resolve itself. Presented with that news, we mixed up another batch of “Poseidon’s lemonade” and left Hazel in the protected town dock of Chalkis and took a road trip past Mount Olympus and to Greece’s second largest city of Thessaloniki.

Yeah, yeah…I know you’re thinking what I’m thinking. If you had to guess that a member of the crew was going to redirect our entire adventure due to a broken nail—you wouldn’t have picked Sunny.

Although today’s Thessaloniki is just one-third the population of Athens (about 40% of Greece’s entire population lives in Athens), historically Thessaloniki was never not an important city. Yes, Athens was a major polis during the Classical Greece, Hellenistic, and Roman periods (roughly 450 BC to 450 AD) but after Rome fell, Athens declined. During the ensuing 1,000 years of the Byzantine Empire and then 400 years of Ottoman domination of Greece, Athens was just a humble village of a few thousand people (which is one reason why its acropolis and ancient ruins are so wonderfully preserved). It wasn’t until Athens was “rediscovered” and named the new capital of Greece in 1834, that its modern form began to take shape. Meanwhile, during the Byzantine period (AD 323-1453), Thessaloniki was the second most important and second richest city in the entire Byzantine Empire (after Constantinople, today’s Istanbul). Like Constantinople, Thessaloniki fell to the Ottomans in the 1400s (Thessaloniki in 1430 and Constantinople in 1453). As we toured the city, Thessaloniki’s city walls were reminiscent of Istanbul’s (Istanbul city walls highlighted in our Turkey Trot post).

Thinking about the connections between Türkiye and Greece it’s interesting to consider that the father of modern Türkiye, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was born in 1881 in Thessaloniki. However, at that time Thessaloniki was part of the Ottoman Empire and would remain so until 1912 (much of the rest of Greece had won its independence from the Ottomans in 1821). (For background, I introduced Atatürk and his popularity in Türkiye in our Turkey Trot post.)

Given all this, while we were in Thessaloniki I decided to tour the modest house where Atatürk was born (Rhett and Sunny opted for an afternoon by the pool). The Turkish Consulate in Thessaloniki is also located on the grounds of the house and the Turkish government runs the house as a free museum. As I walked through the restored rooms with their various exhibits of his life and death, I was reminded of this passage from our Rick Steves’ Istanbul Guidebook…

Atatürk died at 9:05 on November 10, 1938—and every year, all of Türkiye still observes a minute of silence at 9:05 on that day to honor the man they regard as the greatest Turk. For a generation, many young Turkish women worried that they’d never able to really love a man because of their love for the father of their country. Because of Atatürk, millions of Turks today have a flag—and a reason to wave it.

While a memorable paragraph, I had always thought it “just a tad” hyperbolic on a couple counts. Then, back when we were in Istanbul, an İstanbullu told me that the annual minute of silence is a literal minute of silence—people stop whatever they are doing, cars come to a complete stop in the middle of roads and intersections, trains come to a halt on their tracks.

OK, so maybe I was off on the figurative vs. literal thing—but, Women not being able to love another man because of Atatürk? C’mon, that’s too much. Then, that afternoon in Ataturk’s birth house in Thessaloniki, Greece, I meandered into a sparsely furnished room with white walls and a glossy pine floor. Opposite the door, in the outside corner of the room framed by tall windows sat a reproduction of the man himself—looking rather imperious, dressed in a dapper black tuxedo and semi white-gloved. I say “semi” as he was curiously only wearing one glove. His right hand was exposed and in his gloved left hand he held his right glove. Who knows? Perhaps after-hours in the empty museum he comes to life and does his best Michael Jackson moonwalk across the pine floor. Maybe, just maybe, this morning (before opening time) he was so lost in the ecstasy of the dance he forgot to re-glove before assuming his diurnal position?

Anyway, there was also an aluminum and glass half-wall around him to keep any visitors from getting too close. I chuckled as I scanned the empty room thinking about how much overkill the barricade seemed to be. As Türkiye is predominantly Muslim and Muslims are no fans of icons or iconography, I thought the whole thing a bit cheesy. Sure, I have deep respect for the man—but less so for the mannequin. I was in a museum, not Madame Tussauds.

Then, the tide turned and in rolled a tangle of Turkish tourists. They had an entirely different reaction to the Atatürk model. The excitement in the room became palpable and soon the cameras were out and the posing began. I couldn’t help notice that those in the frame with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk tended to be the women around my age.

…the defense rested its case, my two-counts of hyperbole lay dashed in the earth.

In closing, if the Father of the Turks’ birthplace being in modern-day Greece has got you thinking about the fluidity of borders, consider the converse: The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, that is the head of the Greek Orthodox Church with its roughly 300 million worldwide followers is located in today’s Istanbul, Türkiye. (The Patriarchate is to the Greek Orthodox faithful what the Vatican is to Roman Catholics.)

---

---

Fair winds and following seas! We’re currently making our way out of the channels that separate Evia and the mainland (our updated track is here) with our next goal of cruising the Northern Sporades islands.

Last evening at anchor we were treated to a close sighting of a very rare Mediterranean Monk Seal in the midst of a fish dinner. (Sadly, there are less than 1,000 in existence today.)