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Essay: My dad's final voyage
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As my father lay dying, he had a vision of himself sailing home across the cold, dark Atlantic. After he had gone, I needed to see what he had seen.
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By Suzanne Ahearne
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All the lights in the living room had been turned off for the night; all except for the piano light. The head of this brass lamp had been rotated backward, throwing soft light on the wall behind it. The piano was now nothing more than a dark mass in a darkened room.
I was lying on the couch under a blanket, staring at the light as one would a campfire. My father, lying beside me in the hospital bed that we had set up for him a week before, was staring at it, too. It was a ritual I had come to enjoy at the end of days shared with my mother, my sister and an ever-changing guard of home-care workers, doctors and palliative care nurses.
"I'm sailing home on the cold, dark Atlantic."
Each night I phoned to say good night to my husband and young sons at our home in another city. Then I tucked into my makeshift bed here. There was a calm about ending the day this way that my father and I shared quietly and closely.
It was from the shared perspective of our bed that night that he pointed to the piano light and said, "I'm sailing home on the cold, dark Atlantic." I looked at it again. Now I saw that it looked like a solitary ship, casting its light into a dark, clear night around it. I went cold. Scared.
The vision of a ghost ship haunted me
I had once read how the dying sometimes describe their leaving with symbols created from their life experience. My father had been a merchant seaman, based in his home port of Liverpool, England, for 11 of the most formative years of his life. I took the ship to be his symbol, but I couldn't bear for him to leave in the cold and dark -- symbolically or otherwise. "Couldn't it be the warm, bright South Pacific?" I suggested eventually. He laughed and said, "Maybe that would be nice." Then his voice became serious again. "But no. It's the cold, dark Atlantic."
His ship of death that I dreaded and expected came a week after this night. But despite the fact that the image seemed to comfort him, the vision of a ghost ship, manned by one and sailing into the cold and dark, haunted me.
Across the Atlantic to Liverpool
As a photographer, I understand things by photographing them. Perhaps for this reason I thought that if I were to cross the Atlantic on a merchant vessel bound for Liverpool, chronicling the passage with my camera, the image might no longer be so fearful and lonely. So, two-and-a-half years later, I left Montreal on board a container ship for a seven-day, 2,700 nautical mile voyage across the Atlantic to Liverpool.
I've never wanted to be in the open ocean before. I love coastlines in all kinds of weather, but the idea of 360 degrees of water in any kind of weather was frightening. It seemed too vast, too deep and too indifferent to be trusted. Now that I'm out here, I feel quite happy to be floating in so much blue, free of any responsibility.
Thinking of Dad's sea stories
I'm feeling bored, though, with photographing a blue sky and the blue sea, so my cameras mostly sit beside me, waiting. I find I can stare at the water for long periods of time and think about nothing and everything. And I can't be out here without thinking of Dad's sea stories.
Like the one about getting locked up for the night in an Argentinean jail with a few crewmates. And the one about the girl from Vancouver Island he met on a ship from India to England whom he visited years later when his ship sailed down the Alberni Inlet to load logs. And about the monkey he picked out of a writhing burlap bag at a port market somewhere in South America that became his short-lived, messy cabinmate.
He retold these stories in the autumn of the year he died, while recording names and dates on the backs of photos of ships, foreign ports and old girlfriends -- photos he'd kept in a shoebox for half a century.
A rush of memories
Tonight we are served tinned peaches for dessert. Whenever we ate tinned peaches at home, Dad would usually tell us the story about how, in 1946, during one of his first long sea voyages, he nicked a can of peaches from the galley, took it to the loo and devoured the lot. When he returned from this seven-month voyage, he had grown from a five-foot four-inch boy of 17 to an almost six-foot man. For the rest of his 11 years at sea, he stayed close to the food, as kitchen steward, waiter, cook and baker.
I imagine the taste of illicit sweetness in that can of peaches became so inseparable from his memories of being at sea -- the luxury of a full belly after years of wartime rations, the freedom, the smell of the sea, the adventure, the emotional leavings and homecomings from the Liverpool Docks -- that a taste, a feeling, a glimpse of any one, would bring on a rush of memories of the others.
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