by Sarah Outen
Alex took me home that morning and I sobbed my way from taxi to train, staring out of the window or at the floor. There is no way I would have made it by myself: everything felt different and confusing, even the familiar routes. I didn’t know how I was going to cope.
I kicked my heels as we walked away from the station in Oakham, afraid I might see someone we knew but also afraid of the hurt at home. Dad wouldn’t be there. I paused at the corner of our road, and Alex took my hand gently and walked me up to the door. I was trying to be brave, though I can’t imagine why. No one needs to be brave when their Dad has just died. As I opened our front door, Michael wrapped me up in his long bearish arms and I cried and cried. Mum joined the hug and assured me that it would be OK. I didn’t understand; nothing was OK. Nothing at all. She seemed to have been shocked into some sort of exhausted overdrive, running only on adrenaline and, on the outside at least, she appeared surprisingly normal talking to my aunt and uncle in the garden a few minutes later. I supposed I expected everyone to be bawling their eyes out and I was surprised that they weren’t – clearly the shock of a loss does different things to each of us. For now at least it was very public – people were coming to the door to bring flowers or hugs and I see she had to maintain some sort of order on it all. I found Matthew face down on his bed clutching Dad’s watch, bawling and writhing, absolutely empty. I knelt down beside him, trying to hug the hurt away, my whole body stinging with the tears. To look at, he was a strapping rugby lad, part man, part boy and taller than me. But today he had been floored with the most almighty scrum of his life and he was broken. Nothing was OK and nothing was normal. I didn’t see how it ever could be. Our Dad had died. Yesterday we were five and I had two parents. It had just changed and it could never be fixed. We were now four and Mum was a widow. Dad was gone.
Five days before, Mum had returned home after her night shift as a nurse to find Dad struggling with pain in his back and chest, having been awake all night. He was ambulanced to hospital in Leicester where he saw more doctors than most people see in a lifetime and was tested and retested and investigated. They struggled to stabilise his oxygen saturation levels and so had him connected up to a continuous oxygen pump, apparently looking like Darth Vader. He was sick but stable. As it wasn’t the first time he had been admitted into hospital for investigations and no one imagined it would be the last, Mum had said not to worry, and so I hadn’t. Mum kept me updated and I sent notes and messages to him, saying that I would be home soon for the holidays to see him.
Five days after being taken in to hospital, my Dad had died. It was the early hours of the morning and very sudden and unexpected. Mum had been on her night shift at the Oakham hospital when she took a phone call to say he was being ventilated. She tried calling for taxis, afraid to drive herself in that state. There were no taxis. Bloody useless out-in-the-sticks Rutland; if only there had been one car willing to take her. Eventually she rang a friend who drove her through the narrow lanes into the heart of Leicester on what must have been the longest journey of her life. He died just moments before she walked through the hospital doors.
Doctors had been baffled by his condition, ruling out a collapsed vertebra and pulmonary emboli and had been treating him for pneumonia. Later, the post-mortem concluded that my wonderful, brave and brilliant hero of a Dad had finally been defeated by pulmonary emboli, or blood clots in the lungs. Despite the tests, they had obviously gone unnoticed – a common issue, I learned.
The day before he died I had posted a letter to him, promising to be back home soon from Oxford, keen to head out birdwatching with him again and teasing him with our usual banter. I picked up the letter from the doormat the day after I arrived home, the day after he had died.
This was now the worst year of my life. I just floated. Memories and thoughts raced round my head making it thump, while at other times it just stagnated, silently. It still thumped even in the silence, and I thought that it always would do. Right from the start I decided that the best way to heal would be to let the grief do its thing; I wouldn’t deny it or fight it or run from it, but just stand and face it and hope that one day things wouldn’t be so raw.
The day of Dad’s funeral was the sort that makes you smile: the trees thick with leaves and full of pretty flowers, the sun giving a sheen to everything beneath a postcard blue sky. Instructions went out to avoid all black outfits, and happily our friends and family did us proud. They wore all the colours of an artist’s paintbox, matching the church flowers; one friend was top-to-toe in bright orange, my brother had a pink tie and another friend wore a crimson skirt. Dad would have loved it all, including the fact that his own hearse was late, which meant that Alex had to play Pachelbel’s Canon over and over again on the organ until we had all arrived.
Clutching my great-aunt’s arm, and walking behind Mum and my grandfather, I filed into the church behind his wicker coffin. It was shouldered by family and friends, including my brothers; Matthew only just tall enough at fifteen, smart in a new suit, and Michael looking handsome in his army uniform. I tried not to giggle as they struggled to walk on the very narrow flagstones, knowing that Dad would have chuckled, too. Yet I still couldn’t believe it was all happening. Stifled giggles morphed to tears and I felt them slide down my cheeks onto my jacket, soaking the white linen in small patches and dripping onto the bright orange gerbera I had pinned to my lapel.
At the back of the church there was my stand of sunflowers, to match the single stem which I clutched ready to lay on his coffin, complete with a piece of dark blue ribbon round it, Oxford colours. Once the singing had stopped, it was so calm that I decided this was the most peace he must have felt for a long time and imagined him smiling at everyone.
After some welcomes an old family friend, Padre John, invited me forward to the little spot where I had given many readings for carol services in the years before. I knew what it was like to stand in front of a packed house, but I had never read a eulogy. I walked up to his coffin, placed my hand on the rim and turned to face the rows, some smiling, some just staring, all eyes on me and my Dad. As I read, my voice wavered in places, my hand gently thumbing the lavender which Mum had woven into the rim; I felt connected and stronger holding on. In the front row, tears streamed down Matthew’s face; Michael had a sad and lost sort of look; and Mum was looking at me in the way that mums do when they know their children are doing something hard, saying ‘you can do this; I believe in you’, without saying a word.
I got to the bit where I had told Dad about my plans to row across the Indian Ocean one day, and everyone laughed. They laughed again when I said that he, too, had laughed. I announced that I would still be going rowing in 2009 and that I would now be doing so in his memory, raising money for arthritis charities. I broke down as I tried to thank everyone for their support and as I made for Mum’s hug through my tears, the congregation started clapping. I was a bit taken aback – I didn’t think people clapped at funerals. But it was special, and I felt the sickening sadness sitting alongside a little bit of freedom now; for we had just turned the first tiny corner of our crazy grief road.
Chapter 5
The Crazy Grief Road
‘Grief makes one hour ten’
William Shakespeare
Two days after Dad’s funeral I headed to the Hebrides for my basking shark project and a week’s camping with Alex. It might seem strange going off on holiday just after your Dad’s funeral but life still had to go on and I still had a degree to complete – so there was no option to back out. For most of the time I was out on a boat with a local wildlife trust, surveying and sampling the planktic soup the sharks were feeding on. It felt good to be doing my own research, particularly in my favourite place in the world. Yet grief is still grief, wherever you are, and mine was still raw and bleeding at so few weeks. I often sat on the bowsprit in a teary heap, my stomach knotted, my head throbbing from the happy highs and crushing lows. I think I cried more that week than I had ever cried before in my life. T
he trouble with being on a boat only 70 feet long filled with six other strangers is that there is no escape or respite for anyone – everyone knew what I was going through. Everyone heard me cry and saw my pain; it was so public. Normally I champion mantras of positive attitude and optimism, yet I really struggled. I didn’t want respite; I wanted to hurt and to cry. Those desperate moments in the foetal position or screaming into the waves served as a badge of respect and love for my Dad. Even one day at a time was too much to comprehend sometimes; I lived out each hour according to the schedule of duties for the day and each night called Mum, hoping that Dad would pick up, willing him to jump into the conversation and tell me that he was back.
Going back to Oxford after the summer was hard; I still associated it with all of that hurt and pain of finding out Dad was gone. The year ahead quickly became the loneliest and saddest of my life, darker and lower than I thought possible. Alex was studying abroad for a year and most of my friends were in a state of finals mania. For me, the degree was secondary to surviving. For months I didn’t sleep properly, often crying myself into an exhausted heap. I was scared that memories would fade and I hated not being in control of my own feelings, so prone to such intense sadness. I felt volatile and full of rage.
Afraid of exploding completely, I did everything I could to keep some sort of momentum. Rowing was my main therapy; out on the water or training with teammates, I found peace in using my pent-up energy. Without my regular rowing fixes, I am sure that the year would have ended very differently. Just after Dad had died I realised that if I was to survive the grief and complete my degree, then the Blues trialling schedule on top of that would be conducive to little more than accelerated self-destruction. Something had to give, and it had to be that prize – surviving and a degree, in that order, were my priorities now.
Being apart from Alex was both hard and somehow liberating. He found life abroad tricky and lonely and I struggled to convey what I felt in my grieving. It was difficult to communicate and to understand each other. At least alone I could let grief run its course without worrying that I was affecting our relationship. Things at home weren’t going brilliantly either; Matthew was in and out of some very troubled times and went off the rails and I spent many hours travelling home. Michael went out to Afghanistan in the early summer with the army and Mum plodded on, holding us all together as best she could. Everything felt so disparate. But at least I had my plan for the ocean.
My principal and tutor were a bit bemused in my yearly meeting with them when I answered their question about my plans after graduation with, ‘I’m going to row across the Indian Ocean.’ I see now that it probably doesn’t crop up too often as a reply, especially when I added that I was going solo.
I had decided to go it alone during the summer after conversations with other ocean rowers. Given that I had dedicated it to Dad’s memory, this felt right. It wouldn’t be right with anyone else. So I set about figuring out how I would make it happen.
Chapter 6
The Plan is to Make a Plan
‘The only cure for grief is action’
C. S. Lewis
Up to this point in my life I had only ever run college rowing teams, and organised charity balls and school expeditions. In principle, planning an ocean row was simply a scaled up version of one of these; but in practice the step up to pulling off a three-year project with an £85,000 budget, almost no experience, no team and only my student loan as starting capital was monumental. I followed my instinct and took advice, speaking to as many people as possible, making plans and timelines and chipping away at the mammoth piece by piece. In that respect it was just like any other project. Only this time all the energy had to come from within; if I floundered then it would sink. It was my dream and my plan, but I would need a team and a lot of other support to make it happen. Time was an issue, too. I was still a student, busy with finishing off my degree, struggling with grief, rowing, and I planned to work for a year in between Oxford and the ocean, too. I needed both the time and the money that an extra year would afford me. I didn’t really have a plan for working but hoped that it would be something where I could gain useful experience for my future – something to help the CV.
I found the contrast between my long-term goal of the ocean and those days when the grief overwhelmed me exhausting; at times it was as much as I could do just to make it through without breaking down. At others, I couldn’t fight it and would spend hours and hours locked away in my room, bawling my eyes out. It felt desperate and empty, but I tried to tell myself that whatever the ocean would throw at me, I would have already survived the greatest test of my life. Tenacity would get me through this and across the ocean.
In terms of fundraising for my chosen charity, Arthritis Research Campaign, I decided to kick-start it by organising an auction of promises down in the college bar one Friday evening. With the help of friends, family and local businesses I was able to put together fifty lots to go under the hammer – everything from photo shoots and a week in an Alpine apartment to perhaps the world’s most expensive chocolate brownies. We raised £3,000 that night, a real triumph and boost for the funds, as well as being a lot of fun. I also gave my first talk about life on the ocean, which involved a lot of blagging as I really had no idea what it would be like out there. I had never spent more than a few hours by myself, never been completely out of sight of land and had never rowed on anything more salty than the Isis, Oxford’s river. I was amazed and chuffed to have so many people on side; it felt like I was headed in the right direction. That said, they were still only students – I needed to get some bigger money in the bank.
I devoured all the ocean rowing books I could get my hands on, especially solo accounts where I could take away lessons on solitude. The ‘alone’ part didn’t really bother me as I figured that if other people had managed it then so could I; like anything in life it would be a mind game and if I wanted it enough, then I would do it. After all the reading and talking with different folks, I figured that one of the most important skills on the ocean would be the ability to face the highs and lows with a degree of equanimity. Sports psychotherapist Dr Briony Nicholls helped me shape this thinking and, tucked away in the warmth of her little office, she shepherded me through various scenarios and coping strategies, generously giving her time for nothing.
The most crucial part of setting out in the right mindset would be knowing that I had done everything in my power to be as fully prepared as possible, both physically and emotionally. I needed to be confident in my own abilities, safe in the eyes of those whose opinions I valued, and credible in the view of those supporting or sponsoring or following me. Beyond that, there wasn’t much else I could do.
My training started while I was still studying at Oxford and it involved all sorts of mad and wonderful things, as well as painful, boring ones, so as to emulate life at sea. There was a sea survival course where, ironically, I had to rescue other people onto a life raft in a swimming pool in Southampton; in reality there would be no one to rescue me or be rescued on my boat. After a few navigation courses, I spent hours and hours poring over charts and trying to figure out the minutiae of astronavigation – not easy to get to grips with when you’re studying at the kitchen table with no stars in sight. One of my favourite bits was a bespoke medical training crash course with Dr Sean Hudson of Expedition Medicine in his idyllic Lake District home. With his wife Caroline, also a doctor, we talked suppositories, rashes and creams over a curry and then the next day he taught me how to inject myself with anaesthetic and stitch myself up, when to use the magic lolly (basically morphine on a stick) and how to cling-film my arm to my chest in the event of a burn. I found it all very interesting, hoping of course that I would never have to use it while also wondering how well I would cope if forced to. For the final part of the training, Sean had arranged for us to do some training on the water, and we spent an afternoon jumping off the local mountain rescue speedboat into the freezing murk of Ullswater, to be picked up
and thrown in again. It was all done at high speed and, we liked to think, in the style of James Bond. While it was fun it was mostly irrelevant; in reality, there was no way I would be picked up off the ocean in a tiny boat – out there it would be just me, myself and I. Alone really did mean alone.
That said, there would be shipping, and so I needed to brush up on my radio protocol and gain my VHF licence. For some reason I found the Mayday exercise particularly funny and dissolved into giggles when I tried calling for help. There was something so ridiculous about hearing ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday – this is rowing boat blah blah blah’ over the airwaves. I figured anyone hearing that would think they were going mad and not believe a word of it. Even at this stage, there was a fine line between believing I could do it and then wondering how the hell I would. Having never been so far out to sea that I couldn’t see land, I decided that I really ought to check that I liked the oceanic life and so looked for a place on a yacht for a passage across the Indian Ocean, to get a feel for conditions and to experience being out of sight of land. With no luck on the Indian Ocean front, I booked myself a crew place on a 55-foot yacht, on a passage from the north-west tip of Iceland across the chilly waters of the North Atlantic, down the coast of Scotland, through the Irish Sea and round the corner to Plymouth. It was an excellent taster of the routine, fatigue and excitement of life at sea, complete with seasickness, storms and soggy socks and I arrived back in the UK sixteen days later saltier, wiser and with ever more respect for the seas.