by Sukey Forbes
Boats in the Naushon harbor on a calm day, 2007.
The skies the next morning did not look promising, but then my cousin called again. He said he’d checked the forecast for me and the winds were going to be calm by midday. He thought if I could just wait a couple of hours I should have no problem motoring back to Naushon. John knew all about small boats—he’d commanded one in Vietnam. So when he brushed aside my concerns and said, “Do it,” I felt pretty safe. “I wouldn’t send you if I didn’t think it would be fine,” he told me. “And it just might be the highlight of your summer.”
John knew I was nervous about the open ocean, and he said he’d help get me going. As he and his wife, Teresa, helped me load the boat, they tried to calm my nerves about the distance and the weather. Sure enough, by the time we got off the mooring, the weather was spectacular. It was end-of-summer “Charlotte weather,” and the now familiar wistful feeling was beginning to set in. This was just the kind of adventure Charlotte would have loved. I sent a silent prayer to her to join me on the crossing.
We headed out past the breakwater together, I in our glorified skiff, my cousin in a big thirty-footer with two huge engines on the back. He’d given me a compass reading, and he’d promised to escort me until the Vineyard came into view on the horizon. From there it would be easy, he said, with Naushon tucked in just on the other side of the larger island.
The breeze was gorgeous, the seas were calm, and the two boats were just zipping along, heading out into the blue water. I knew the Cape was to the north and the Vineyard was to the west, and after a while I could see the promised speck of land. John signaled for me to slow down while they pulled alongside. “Just stay on this compass heading and you’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t go that way or you will hit the shoals.” He looked at me and then added with a grin, “You will be fine. I know that grandfather of yours taught you celestial navigation, so if it gets dark you’ll be able to find your way as well.”
I waved good-bye to them and started off. A couple of minutes later I saw the large and very familiar boat out of the corner of my eye. John was waving me to the right and pointing his long arm like a weather vane. I smiled and nodded and waved again, and once more I took off. A few more moments passed, and then he was alongside again, looking mildly concerned but mostly amused. This sea captain thing was trickier than I’d thought. Go the wrong way and you could just keep on going.
At last my cousin must have been satisfied that I wasn’t heading to Portugal, because he fell off and turned around, and I had this moment of “Oh my god—I’m out on the ocean all alone.” There were no boats anywhere, and that speck of land I’d seen earlier now seemed rather less distinct.
“So, Charlotte . . . What d’you think?” I said. “Think we can find North America?”
I opened up the throttle and started flying along at full speed, all by myself, the surface undulating in those big ocean swells. My hair was blowing in the wind, and by now any fear had given way to excitement, so much so that the exuberance rose up from the tips of my toes through my entire torso, then expressed itself as a thrilled howl at the top of my lungs. John was right. This was the best I’d felt all summer. This was the best I’d felt in years.
When I got to Woods Hole, I left the boat for a cousin to pick up and ferry over to Naushon. Then I got in a taxi for the forty-five-minute ride to the Steamship Authority dock at Hyannis to pick up my car.
The driver was a chatty Middle Eastern man, and when I got in the car I just couldn’t contain myself. I told him all about what I’d just done and he acted suitably impressed. “You are full of courage,” he said. But mostly I was just full of myself, feeling ebullient, feeling great. We went on to have a lovely conversation about the summer and the change of seasons and I was like a talk show host, drawing him out, asking him about his background and how he came to be living on the Cape and driving a cab.
When we got to Hyannis and pulled into the parking lot, he turned around to look at me and said, “Your husband is one heck of a lucky man. I hope he really appreciates you because you are just one heck of a woman. And if it doesn’t work out, I want you to call me up!”
We laughed. He was a big, fat, bald grandfather type, but he was utterly charming. Then he said, “I had such a nice time talking to you today. You are just so full of life.”
I thought, “Wow. He thinks I’m full of life. Am I?” And then I thought, “Yeah. I guess I am.”
As I got out of that taxi I felt that every cell in my body was humming. And I said to myself, “Okay. Maybe I’m back.”
• • •
In 2011, and with great regret, Michael and I decided to pursue an amicable divorce. Now when I go back to Naushon it’s just me, or me and Cabot and Beatrice. But each time I go I include a visit to the family memorials hidden in the woods in the Aisle of Beeches.
Up a small rise from the cluster of graves my eyes now automatically seek out the plaque that we placed on the boulder in remembrance of our little girl. I still go up to clear away the vines, and I sometimes take a nap in the cool dirt in front of the boulder and commune with her.
The year Charlotte died, Tibetan prayer flags appeared in the trees above her stone. I have no idea who hung them there, but they’ve lasted through many winters now. And each season I find little fairy houses made of sticks at her memorial, constructed no doubt by her young cousins. It comforts me to know that, generations hence, she’ll be remembered on the island as the beautiful little Forbes girl who was taken by a fever when she was six.
It’s hard to know the woman I would be today had I not been utterly derailed by the death of my daughter. Even now I find myself cataloging memories in terms of “before Charlotte died” and “after Charlotte died.”
She’s been gone longer than she was ever here. The passage of time since her death has not softened its impact, but the years have allowed me to file the wound inside of me so that it does not overpower me on a daily basis. The triggers that bring on the pain are better known to me and I am better able to sit with the pain when it comes. But that doesn’t make the pain any less.
On my first visit to her memorial, I realized that this was a place for the living, a place to trigger our memories of Charlotte, and that she shows up only when I show up. Otherwise, at least in my mind, she’s at the beach with her friends on some perfect adventure.
I chose to look deeply enough into Charlotte’s death to somehow find the gift of the loss. Which is to realize just how much is not important in life, and how important it is to let all the unimportant stuff go. And there is so much that is just not important. I often feel like reciting that monologue from Our Town, the one in which the young woman given a furlough from the graveyard wants to jolt all the citizens of Grover’s Corners into seeing and feeling the beauty of the life they’re living every hour of every day.
I still have Charlotte’s pigtails in the drawer where I keep the Mass card from her funeral, the autopsy report, and other fragments of her life and her death. Her sparkly pink shoes rest on my desk atop a stack of books. And I still sit there at my desk, going through these things and, yes, grieving. But when I see Charlotte again, I don’t want to have to say, “I took to my bed after you died. Losing you just about finished me.” Instead I want to be able to say, “Hey, what have you been doing? This is what I’ve been doing. This is what I learned from losing you while you were still so young.”
I don’t ever expect to be finished with grieving, nor do I want to be. My main job right now, though, is providing a safe and nurturing environment for my two living children and continue to coparent them well with Michael. I still hold everything that was Charlotte close, and there is a gaping hole in my heart that I don’t expect will ever be filled. It will stay black and it will stay painful. But in compensation for that hole, what I’ve been able to do is grow my heart larger. The hole is there, but there’s more room for life.
There is still room for grief even while I’m full of life. Without hesitation I would trade every bit of this newfound zest for my daughter’s safe return, but that can’t be. Instead I’ll stay full of life, for me and for Charlotte, and I’ll honor her life by carrying her through mine.
On Naushon, not long after that trip to Santa Rosa and my “rite of passage” boat ride back from Nantucket, I took a walk along Memory Road (that’s its name—really). I was looking up at the sky, feeling the sun and wind on my face, when suddenly I was overwhelmed by a feeling of love and acceptance and belonging. The ground I was walking on was my family’s ground, and I was feeling deeply embraced by that family. That’s when it occurred to me for the first time that it was okay to feel okay. Charlotte was with me, and I was able to share this experience of profound love with her. I kept repeating, “I love you” and “Isn’t this magnificent?”
At that moment I realized that I’m no longer even remotely concerned about death. In fact, I look forward to it—not that I’m in any hurry, mind you. But I have a child over there, and family, and lots of other great people. So when death comes . . .
Walking along that island path, the feeling of love and connection so overwhelmed me that I closed my eyes, tilted my face toward the sun, and kept walking, trusting that I knew the way well enough not to break the spell by smashing into a tree. The sensations flooding my body seemed like what all the mystics describe when undergoing their “peak” experiences, whether it’s Saint Paul on the way to Damascus, or a Forbes in the 1920s doing “Sacred Dances” at a guru’s château outside Paris, or a hippie Forbes from the sixties sitting in an ashram in India. I felt a complete cleansing—maybe even a rebirth—which somehow needed to be marked and celebrated. This was Naushon, not Galilee, and there was no Jordan River, but Silver Beach was right there. So I stripped off all my clothes and went running into the water, just the way my grandfather David Cabot Forbes had taught us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A few key people set the tone for my journey through grief and subsequent writings. Connie and Bob Loarie reached out to me via letter and, by sharing a friend’s story, offered the only words that brought me solace in the initial months after Charlotte’s death. Michealene Cristini Risley, Jackie Speier, Jan Yanehiro, and Deborah Collins Stephens planted the seed in me that was the genesis of this project when they asked me to contribute an essay on my grief experience for their book, This Is Not the Life I Ordered. Once I started writing I found I could not stop.
A rich tapestry of extended family on all sides has allowed me the great lifetime blessing of feeling embraced by a clan. I am grateful each day for the legacy left behind by John Murray Forbes. The continued shared sense of stewardship of both land and family has been passed down and cherished in our family now for eight generations. My gratitude is extended to those family members who shared recollections, letters, archival information, and in some cases diplomatic advice: Beatrice F. Manz, Ruth F. Brazier, Ralph Forbes, Tally Saltonstall Forbes, Jim Saltonstall, Paul Elias, Perry F. Williamson, Beth Colt, George Howe Colt, Sophie Morse, David Gregg, Scott Schoenfeld, Eliza Castaneda, and Dan Emerson.
My sister-in-law Anne Savarese, MD, deserves special mention. She saved Charlotte’s life the first time and then held our family in her tight embrace after Charlotte could not be saved the second time. By sharing Charlotte’s story in her own lectures as a pediatric anesthesiologist she has given a face to malignant hyperthermia and in so doing has personalized the syndrome to more physicians.
The gratitude I feel for my group of readers and friends, some of whom read every draft of the manuscript, each time with a fresh eye, can never be adequately stated. They offered feedback on content, flow, and fact checks, as well as much-needed encouragement. When the going got rough they patched me up with duct tape, tireless listening, big hugs, boxes of tissue, nutritious meals, long walks, wine, milk chocolate, and moral support too many times to count. Thank you, Stephanie Warburg, Tally Forbes, Jamie and Alison Forbes, Beth Colt and PK Simonds, Paul Elias and Marie Lossky, Alex Kerry, Tom Dwyer, Jennifer George, Nicole and Matt Miller, Ralph Forbes, Julia McLean, Nancy Adams and Scott Schoen, Patty and Charles Ribakoff, and especially Kevin O’Leary.
Suzane Northrup and Blair Chymberjehle provided insights into this life and beyond and nurtured in me the ability to further develop my own belief system. Blair’s guidance and counsel continue to source my soul. She is an angel on this earth. Yogis Jacque Bonwell, Jordan Lashley, Alexandra Wheelock, and Baron Baptiste watched me breathe, weep, and flow through many of their classes and helped create space inside of me for writing and healing. Namaste.
Marcia Mafra, my secret weapon. She has the most positive attitude and innate sense of kindness of anyone I know. The perfect assistant who always knows what I need before I do and quietly delivers it with a smile. Everyone knows I am lost without her. She makes our life work.
Without William Patrick I would never have been able to thread together all my loose ramblings and recollections into a cogent and readable narrative. He asked all the right questions to bring clarity to the issues and is great company to boot. He is a true friend, the perfect confidant, and a brilliant editor.
Bonnie Solow of Solow Literary, my agent and new old friend. Oh, how I won the lottery when we found each other. She called me to higher levels on all fronts and delivered even more in return. Her passion for excellence is unwavering and her capacity for empowering is extraordinary.
My editor at Viking Penguin, Carole DeSanti, along with Viking’s president, Clare Ferraro, immediately “got” my story. Carole’s pointed but profound questions along the way pulled a richness of story from me that I did not know existed.
Also at Viking, Chris Russell, Carolyn Coleburn, Nancy Sheppard, Paul Lamb, Winnie DeMoya, Rebecca Lang, and the rest of team took me under their wings and helped launch this book. Each brought their A-game and seemingly boundless knowledge and enthusiasm to our meetings.
Mark Fischer did yeoman’s work reviewing all legal documents. His turnaround was quick and his wit even quicker.
Sandi Mendelson and her team at Hilsinger Mendelson have been a dream come true in their energy and commitment to the promotion of this book.
The Massachusetts Historical Society, Historic New England (formerly SPNEA), and Harvard’s Houghton Library provided quiet spaces for research and reading.
Social media is a curious phenomenon and one I have joined only in the last two years. In particular, my Facebook and Twitter network of “friends” has provided feedback, comic relief, inspiration, and a great place to hide while procrastinating. Many of them I do not know personally, and yet through this modern marvel of communication they have become important parts of my process.
I have been blessed with great parents, Tally Saltonstall Forbes and Ralph Forbes, who, along with my siblings, Jamie Forbes, Heidi Forbes Oste, and Laura Forbes Hill, have provided valuable feedback about areas of close- and extended-family sensitivities. They have all been champions of my work and have shown grace in their acceptance of my words in some of the more delicate family sections.
Michael Bigham urged me to take on this project and continued to be supportive despite challenges along the way. Our three children have been fortunate beneficiaries of his love and devotion.
Cabot Forbes Bigham and Beatrice Emerson Bigham, the two greatest reasons that I smile and feel joy. Thank you for letting me read aloud to you and for your patience when I had to spend extra time working through a section of the manuscript or sketching out an idea. My beloved children, as I said in the beginning, this book is for you.
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