Slowly and Painfully, Realizing My Altered Existance

As I wait day after day for my doctor to call, I'm realizing that this is it.  This is my life now.  Maybe there are some pills I can take every day for the rest of my life that may subdue my symptoms but I will never be the same.  I've missed so many opportunities that I thought I would have had years to realize. Of course someday I would become unable to do things that required physical ability, if I were lucky enough to live that long, but I'm thirty-seven.  I thought I would have had more time, but that was really very naive I suppose.

Four nights a week my husband, who is a boat captain, skippers a water taxi in the harbor.  When my daughter and I visit, he often takes us for a short ride to find seals or sometimes even dolphins right outside the harbor.  Last time it was just after sunset as we motored back into the harbor.  The lights of Avalon were coming on but the mountains were still silhouetted by an ever fading purple sky.  It was painfully beautiful.  The breeze blew across my face and through my hair and my daughters fine wisps of hair danced like tiny feathers.  I started to cry silently as I realized how much I missed Perdida.  She was the 35' Allied Seabreeze yawl (and the obvious inspiration for my screen name) that my significant other and I lived on for almost four years.  I could almost see her elegant lines and teal colored hull tied up to a mooring in the harbor as I had seen her so many times before.  Tears ran down my face.  I remembered sitting in the cockpit on an evening just like that one with a glass of wine in my hand, the boat rocking gently and my feeling so lucky, that I pondered my situation almost in disbelief. 

My parents always had a boat while I was growing up.   As a child, I suffered from undiagnosed & untreated depression. The rocking of the boat and the smell of the sea air were my anti-depressants and psychotherapy I suppose.  My father had been in the Navy and then lived on boats, worked on boats, helped build boats and just loved everything about boats.  He jokingly called himself a viking, not for his love of pillaging and plundering of course, but for the sea and his Norwegian heritage.  The first boat I remember our family having was a 37' wood-hulled cabin cruiser fittingly named Valhalla, which was the name of almost every other boat my parents owned.  As a little girl I felt so safe on the boat with my dad and mom.  Sleeping in the v-bunks with my younger brother at night, our stuffed animal-filled nets swinging against the wooden bulkhead was true bliss.  Anytime I was sad or troubled, I closed my eyes and brought myself back to that v-bunk. I tried to recreate the sound of the water swishing and gurgling past as the bow split through the water, the wooden hull the only thing separating my body from the sea.  I even tried to feel the gentle motion of the wooden boat. To own my own boat and go on great sea adventures was my great aspiration from childhood and on to adulthood.   I was partial to sailing boats though, or at least I thought I was.  I had never actually sailed on a sailboat. 

By the time I'd graduated college and joined the rat race I'd read almost every cruising book I could get my hands on.  From Francis Chichester's account of the first solo Around the World race, to "Managing 12 volts", I'd read and studied them all.  I lived in New Jersey but worked for a software development company in Mid-town Manhattan.  I had a one hour train ride each way and I used my time wisely by reading. One particular moment stands out in my mind for some reason.  I was reading Beth Leonard's "Cruising Handbook" on the train ride home, when I looked out the window to see the graffiti covered brick walls of one of the many factory building that lined the tracks.  In my heart I thought "I'm really gonna do this! I'm gonna sail outa here!".  A shiver of fear or anticipation ran through me that I'd never felt before.

In addition to all my reading, we had taken lessons, gotten our American Sailing Association Certifications, and Chart Navigation Certifications.  My significant other and I went to SailExpo every year in Atlantic City, attended all the seminars and took serious notes.  We really felt that we were ready for the next big step.

After a couple years of preparing we bought a boat.  Perdida.  She was more than we wanted to spend, but we fell in love with her instantly.  She was a classic beauty.  The day we took ownership I had a paralysing panic attack.  This, a time of total confusion and terror like I had never felt, was merely a glimpse into my near future, when I would be absolutely tortured by anxiety and panic for the next two years.  But that time in my life could fill a book by itself, so I won't start that story here. 

After two years of sailing Perdida in NJ and NY waters, we had Perdida's masts unstepped and loaded her on a huge truck to be shipped across the country to Newport Beach, California.  The plan was, from there, to sail her to Hawaii which we figured conservatively to be a twenty-two day sail in open ocean  After a couple years of living on Perdida in Avalon and Two Harbors and never being on the same page about anything, we broke up.  He's living in Hawaii now and I'm still here on Catalina.  It's another story I won't digress into now.

I wanted to tell my story that led up until now to try and convey the great amount of energy and self that was spent on this endeavor.  I wanted to emphasize how much of my being was completely consumed in order to achieve this purpose.  My boat meant everything to me and had become a part of me.  I realized one day that I had subconsciously anthropomorphised her into a creature that I lived inside and that protected me and loved me.  The day I watched her sail out of the harbor without me, broke my heart into so many pieces that I cannot put them back together. I cannot let go.  Perdida represented my future, and now I feel I have none.

Now I know that my chance has passed.  I could  never sail a boat now, I can barely walk up a flight of stairs.  I'm still coming to terms with the profundity of this disease, mourning the life I could have had but is now impossible.  My life has lost a dimension.  Every day is spent in my apartment with my daughter and my husband if he's not working.  I can go out once a day if I'm up to it and walk as far as the pier before I start feeling too weak.  Then it's back home to lay on the couch dripping with sweat, short of breath and hurting everywhere, to recover from my adventure.  The occasional phone call or winter hotel guest to check in, just makes me have to move when all I really want to do is lay down and sleep.  I've been repeating this dreary routine every day for the last six months, which feels like years.  I could never hold down a "real" job.  I really don't think I could do it.

I found out today that my doctor won't be back in the office until the 14th.  So nice of her to return my two calls and note before she left.