The Outer Banks—the North Carolina barrier islands where I grew up—were a windy, precarious place where the slick bones of shipwrecks were revealed at low tide. In northeast winds I glimpsed the rooftops of houses that belonged to the lost town of Seagull, a village swallowed by a migrating sand dune. I liked to imagine the darkened windows of Seagull’s post office and cottages, ghost crabs flitting sideways through their hidden rooms. As a child I believed I could dig my way back there and dwell in the hush. On tiny, deserted Portsmouth Island I wandered through the silent downtown—empty schoolhouse, lonely country store, salt-stunted live oaks—abandoned after years of declining industry. On our islands the past disappeared and then reappeared: swallowed by sand and hurricanes, then revealed again when the wind changed direction. Even our wild mustangs galloped out of history, descendants of the horses carried on Spanish ships in the 1500s. Growing up, I tacked a map of famous local shipwrecks to my bedroom wall. There were so many that our sliver of ocean, where ships encountered the always-shifting sandbars of our Diamond Shoals, was called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. I dreamed of sails billowing toward coastlines they’d never reach and drowned sailors levitating in deep-blue rooms. I ran my finger over the names of lost ships: the USS Monitor, the Patriot, the El Salvador, the Queen Anne’s Revenge.
Even before I was school age, I was aware of the weight of the sea. I knew it crushed divers and submarines, was heavy like a thousand pianos. I could have told you that the column of water that descends to the bottom of the Mariana Trench weighs more than fifteen thousand pounds. I knew unsightly creatures lurked in those inky depths: the female anglerfish with its huge head and terrible teeth, the common fangtooth with its mouth agape, the frilled shark with its eellike body, the lantern fish awash in its own eerie light. When my husband died six years ago, the past slipped over me like an ocean. Last summer I was sitting at a bar, watching TV with my sister, when we saw that a submersible had imploded while descending to the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five occupants. I think I know why the men aboard that vessel paid a fortune and risked their lives to view sunken decks and staterooms. I cannot stop examining artifacts: the outback hat my husband wore home from Australia; our daughter’s paintings and Latin awards; the ticket stubs from the Senator Theatre, where velvet curtains parted and the three of us ate snowy popcorn in the flickering twilight.
When our daughter was in high school, my husband and I rented a camper van and took her on a trip through California’s parks. We arrived at Joshua Tree at night, under a clean map of stars, and folded our table into a bed. This would be our last holiday as a family. Each day was clear and seventy degrees with a slight breeze. In Pismo Beach, Mavis walked the shore collecting sand dollars in a basket while I photographed pelicans with enormous throat pouches gathered on a pier. We slept in a redwood forest beneath the distant canopy and stopped in Calistoga Springs to take the waters, slipping lazily between pools. We spent one night in a hotel in Beverly Hills, a chandelier made of antlers hanging above us, then took the Hollywood Walk of Fame, pausing to pose on the stars. Tom found Neil Armstrong’s name in a moon near the corner of Hollywood and Vine. I still believe I could meet those versions of us again if I could just find the map my husband drew on a napkin in a diner that served strawberry pie. In Monterey we spent an afternoon at the aquarium, watching jellyfish parachute above their ribboned tentacles and schools of silvery fish flick their tails. I kept a framed photo of the three of us silhouetted in front of that heavy blue tank, looking as if we had gone to live in mythical, drowned Atlantis.
As a child I spent time with my great-grandparents Henry and Irene. They moved slowly, as if burdened by the vastness of an invisible sea. By the time I met them, they were eighty years old and had left their sprawling farm behind for a brick house in town. Henry drifted in a reclining chair, reading obituaries, while Irene tended baby animals (chicks, kittens, goats) with heat lamps and bottles. They appeared unmoored, displaced. Time had washed over them; the things they had known and the people they had loved had floated away. The past was a place where red-haired Henry courted blue-eyed Irene in a parlor with a fireplace. (It was also the place where he won her affections by flinging the chocolates brought by other suitors into the flames when she left the room to fetch tea, a story I loved.) They told me about riding horses, quilting, cooking on woodstoves. They had once worn stiff collars and wide-brimmed hats, and my great-grandmother’s skirts had brushed the floor. I did not understand then all they had lost, did not know that loss itself had a weight. I didn’t know what my great-grandfather was searching for when he opened the newspaper each day to the names of the newly dead, and I didn’t know why my great-grandmother kept hundreds of fabric scraps in her closet, each one cut from a garment or curtain that had belonged to her parents. I saw her porcelain false teeth in a jar in the bathroom but did not know how she had wept when the dentist removed the last of her own teeth and took a mold of her bare gums.
When my husband died, I was flooded with memories from my childhood. I suppose I longed to be a child: weightless, devoid of history. I was jealous of babies who did not yet know their own names. I stared into black-and-white family photos, imagining my way back to the warmth of vanished rooms. The objects that had witnessed my young life took on a new significance: the books whose spines had listened to lost voices, the blankets that had known our backs, the lamps that had lit our evening meals. I understand why people stand in museums contemplating the Titanic’s dinner menus and deck chairs, the watches with their hands permanently stuck at 2:20, the sheet music the band played as everything around them sank. Eventually the objects—mute, damp, blind—are all that is left of our stories. My mother cannot let go of the art and furniture of dead friends and relatives, their paintings stacked on the floor of her bedroom. One distant cousin amassed old cars, imagining the people who once rode in their seats, the lost scenes that filled their windows. After his wife died, he hoarded take-out meals in sticky styrofoam containers until rats came to gnaw on the rotting food and snakes arrived to eat the rats, slithering through holes in the darkness. I stockpiled jars of organic baby food after my daughter was born, and pretty clothes after my husband died, and novels during COVID. I once helped my grandfather fill his shed with dish soap we’d found on sale, the back of his truck laden with enough bottles to wash decades of plates and cups and knives.
I have spent hours in attics, the kind reached by pulling a rope in the ceiling and ascending to a stagnant room. It was in attics that I found love letters tied with ribbons, and wedding dresses in paper boxes the size of coffins, and sepia photographs of uncles in uniform and children who’d died of scarlet fever. I sifted through images of wraparound porches and white chickens, three-legged dogs and men with cigars. I think there is a reason why the past collects in attics: heavily, above us.
I was forty-eight years old when I watched my husband die in a cold, hard hospital room where it was never night or day. I walked into that hospital as one person and emerged as another. Whales, as you may know, were once terrestrial creatures who moved back and forth between the land and the sea. When my daughter was little, we walked through a museum that documented their evolution: their hind legs growing smaller and smaller until they became like the training wheels on a bicycle. Then the whales swam away. Whatever they once knew of sand dunes and cypress trees left them. I too have been separated from my history. I sold our family’s cabin on the mountain and lived in rented rooms. I bought a condominium, then found myself traveling so often that I rented it out to German exchange students. My sand dunes and cypress trees are locked away in a garage, stacked in stifling boxes.
During the COVID lockdown my daughter came home from college, and we wandered through old New England cemeteries, among thin slate markers decorated with death’s-heads. It was soothing to linger in the silence of the past. We noticed how some old gravestones settled into hills so that only their tips were visible; it seemed to us that the earth meant to swallow them. We walked, too, around the edges of the drowned towns of Massachusetts’s Swift River Valley—Enfield, Prescott, Dana, and Greenwich—all of them flooded by the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir so that the citizens of Boston would have enough water. We read about how the four towns were demolished and the residents displaced, about villagers dancing during Enfield’s final midnight ball in 1938. We imagined church pews and blackboards and bed frames sinking, wandered down old roads that disappeared underwater.
I once taught school with a man whose entire family—four children and a wife—had been wiped out in a car crash. He was a birder who traveled to far-flung islands hoping to catch a glimpse of certain species. He kept a life list. It seemed to me that he was searching for his family when he searched skies and branches for rare songs and plumage. Just before my paternal grandmother died, she bought hummingbird feeders and sat on her porch swing, smoking cigarettes and listening to the trill of wings. Maybe she and the teacher were drawn to birds because birds seem to move between heaven and earth. Maybe they watched birds because birds look weightless, surfing on invisible air currents. The Wright brothers came to my childhood island, dreaming of flight. They floated over on a ferry, drawn to our winds from three directions, our soft, forgiving dunes. In Ohio they had been studying vultures and building wind tunnels. They wrote letters to our postmaster, and he wrote back with descriptions of our remote shores. It was the postmaster’s wife who saved the white sateen Orville and Wilbur used on the wings of their first glider, cutting it into dresses for her daughters.
During the last years of my husband’s life he and I lived with our daughter in a cabin on top of a mountain in West Virginia and found ourselves in the migration routes of birds. Each spring we opened our windows, and sometimes a thrush or sparrow lost its way and troubled our rafters. Tom, who had once practiced bird banding on North Manitou Island in Michigan, knew how to catch the frightened, unpredictable creatures in his wide hands and return them to the air.
Our cottage had been built by a doctor who’d once owned the entire ridge: five twelve-acre lots, including ours with our cabin—which was meant to house his eldest children—and a family compound with a dozen bedrooms and fenced land for dogs and goats. Then his fortunes had changed, and each of his dwellings had been repossessed by the bank, his six homeschooled children uprooted in the middle of a brittle winter. He had a grand wooden entrance at the base of his driveway, and I saw him chop it down with an axe, his anger falling heavily against the wood. Later my daughter and I glimpsed his bearded goats drifting through the streets and followed them to the mouth of a cave, where they slept in a nest of hay. We visited them twice, bringing carrots and apples, and were haunted by their horns and cloven hooves, their rectangular pupils like doors at the centers of their eyes. After a blizzard my daughter and I hiked along our ridge on snowshoes to the doctor’s compound and peered in through his windows at a cold stone hearth and a silent kitchen table, our breath blooming against the glass.
The iceberg that sank the Titanic weighed 1.5 million tons. It was more than two miles wide and one hundred feet tall when it began its journey toward the ship’s route in the North Atlantic. April 14, 1912, was a calm, clear night, dark beneath a waning crescent moon. I think of the Titanic’s gymnasium, squash courts, and oak-paneled lounges, its saltwater pool and bay windows. Ninety percent of the iceberg was submerged, and no wind blew, so there were no ripples at its base.
It was like this the week before my husband died. It was late October, and we had just celebrated our wedding anniversary in an Italian restaurant across from the train station where he used to arrive, a backpack over one shoulder, to visit me in college. We went to our daughter’s first parents’ weekend at Mount Holyoke, where, in the science building, Tom posed beside the skeleton of a woolly mammoth. His iceberg was the hole that opened silently in his heart. Mine is the part of my history that remains hidden when I shake hands with strangers.
I fell in love again after my husband died. I sent a letter to a man I’d known in college, and it was returned to me; I sent another to his mother, who delivered it to him at a bar in Worcester, Massachusetts, and he wrote back. We had breakfast together in a diner where we had eaten home fries and blueberry pancakes when we were twenty. He was a bachelor, and on his bedroom wall hung a sketch he had made of me reclining in 1989, when we’d shared a house near Smith College and I had suffered a bout of mononucleosis. The doctor who diagnosed me called it the “kissing disease,” but I thought it should have been called the “sleeping disease.” This man and I grew close during the months I lay exhausted on a couch, surrounded by stacks of books. I have never again felt as heavy as I did that fall, when each flight of stairs became endless and the gravity in my ballet class seemed to increase.
When I met him again, he was clearing twenty-four acres of land in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. There was a collapsing farmhouse at the edge of his property, amid the remains of an apple orchard, its roof sagging from winter snows, its walls crumbling, trees growing through the boards of the front porch. Human residents had been replaced by animals: mice in the oven, a partridge dancing on the dining-room table, a pair of kittens who appeared in an upstairs window one June afternoon to watch us plant wildflowers. I was drawn to this house, found myself peering inside through ghostly curtains. I thought its ruined rooms were beautiful: rugs covered with fallen leaves, a ceiling of stars, the moon illuminating a bone-white sink.
Five years before my husband died, his father could not catch his breath and was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. Hospice was called in, and Tom kept vigil at his father’s bedside during his last weeks, in a ranch home in northern Michigan, while a late-April snow deepened. He learned from nurses how to give baths, morphine, and sips of water using a sponge instead of a cup. Later he would be troubled by the image of his father sucking hard on a sponge with blue lips: his mouth clinging to life. My husband sat near the math textbooks his father had authored, arranged on a shelf among calculators, pencils, and line graphs. When he returned to our cabin, Tom began drinking Slurpees from plastic cups, noisily sucking the melted slush through a straw. He moved our armoire from the foyer into the bedroom, moved the kitchen table to the living room, moved the piano to a loft, where it overlooked a cliff. It was as if our furniture were an equation he intended to solve. It was all so heavy: the bookshelves he lugged to the basement, the coffee table he shoved against a wall. Our rooms were never still. Once, I sat down in a vanished chair and felt the soft air give way.
In her poem “Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies,” Edna St. Vincent Millay explains that “Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age / The child is grown, and puts away childish things. / Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.” By this definition I had a long childhood, one that reached well into my thirties, when, at last, the people who loved me began to vanish. The first was my paternal grandmother, Annie Belle, who died one June day in 2005 after a year of unintentional weight loss, her wizened body refusing nutrition. Afterward her cigarette smoke slipped into the ether, and her Dixie cups of Pepsi disappeared from the coffee table, and her hummingbird feeders hung empty on her front porch. Next, my maternal grandfather, Henry—who built a blue attic bedroom and a playhouse for me in the months before I was born—drove to a grocery store in late December of 2014 and had a heart attack while buying sliced ham, leaving behind a luminous Christmas tree and carefully wrapped gifts for each of his descendants. And, finally, Tom, whose heart could not be repaired, died in the darkness of November 2018, when we were both forty-eight. He had flown to a business conference in Colorado from which he would never return.
Millay writes, “To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, / who neither listen nor speak; / Who do not drink their tea, though they always said / Tea was such a comfort.” I am fifty-four now and quite grown up, and I sit every day at that table with the dead. Even my dead dogs are there: Hambone, a droopy-eyed basset hound who died in a house fire when I was eight, and Turtle, my low-slung dachshund who spent her life defending me from babies, wagons, and men who came to fix the kitchen sink. My miscarried baby sits, half-formed, in a high chair with a rattle. My husband goes on cooking sausages and slicing bagels, though he cannot eat them, and my grandmother closes the curtains and steps onto the porch in her nightgown to examine the azaleas. My grandfather, who was a postmaster at a rural post office, wears his blue uniform and reads a newspaper through horn-rimmed glasses. My daughter’s dead pets watch me butter my toast: the burgundy betta fish that fanned his gauzy tail; her hamster, Professor, who steered a plastic car, drunkenly, through our living room; her rose hair tarantula, Rapunzel, who had long silky legs and threw her hairs whenever she felt threatened.
I grew up beside cottages swallowed by the sea in hurricanes, building sandcastles that did not last until noon. I owned a map of thousands of sunken ships, a ghost fleet that never reached their destinations. My childhood island should have instructed me in loss, made me better able to navigate my adult life. I am frustrated by my widow self: I move slowly, I have no proper profession, my dishes are sticky, I am constantly running out of money. But sometimes I watch snowy egrets ride on the backs of wild mustangs, and sometimes I sleep on the beach and wake to pelicans unfolding in the sky. I dwell in crumbling farmhouses and in villages lost to sand dunes and floods. I walk the grand staircase of the Titanic and swing from its chandeliers. The past calls to me the way lighthouses call to sailors. I weigh as much as the ocean.
