It took until 3a.m. to hear, alone there in that darkness. The SS Angevin Queen, two days out of Bergen when a fire in her engine had her drifting in the storm and stricken on the ridge not half a mile from our shore. Your crew was called and you went to her. In that hideous, swirling blackness she was breaking. The gusts and the swell were too bad to winch off her crew but your skipper somehow managed to get the lifeboat alongside and got two of you aboard. You tied on the line and saw them across in atrocious conditions. Six out of the eight of them you saved, you and Tommy Pippen. Then another wave split her in two and down she went, swamped in an instant. Everything that you were, all that complexity and joy and beauty and tenderness, all of that lost in a moment, all for the sake of a single burning engine.
You must have known, they said. As soon as it started to go down they saw you cutting the line so that the lifeboat wouldn’t be dragged below with it. Tom’s body washed ashore some days back but you are still out there, still lost. They call you a hero and a thousand eyes are crying but that’s no good to me. I need you to be here again. I know it’s impossible but you have to try and find a way because there can be no happiness without you. The like of you simply cannot exist. I’m begging you again, even though you didn’t listen to me before, please, please come back to me.
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