It's been a big week! I did my first reading at a release party, and I’m launching my blog! Read below to experience both...
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October 8th marked the one-year anniversary of my father's passing. I chose to make the day a celebration by visiting places that hold deep meaning for me. I spent time walking outdoors, reflecting among the changing leaves and the shifting season. During this special day, I had the honor of reading a piece I wrote for the Fall Issue of The Boardman Review. I’m sharing an excerpt from that piece below.
If you’ve ever seen the Mackinac Bridge from its underside, it’s intimidating. Not many people have, but those of us who know what the 200-foot-high bridge looks like as her green stanchions rise from the depths of two of Michigan’s most formidable Great Lakes also know how the water underneath her appears as it fades from clear near the shore to murky near the main channel. The first time I observed the water that flows through the bridge’s massive underbelly from that angle, I immediately recognized it as a profound metaphor for life; in an instant and without warning, things can go from calm to unsettling.The Straits of Mackinac are four miles across, an expanse that separates Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas. I’ve swam it twice, and in doing so followed passages shared by important people in my life.
In 2015, I crossed south to north, traversing the route my grandfather and father did on their way towards Mass City and deer camp, and then again in 2019, when I swam north to south, tracing the path once traveled by my grandmother.The endeavor of swimming the Straits, admittedly, is not a small feat, complicated by the distance, the current, and the cold water. It was just about at the confluence where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet when it occurred to me that I was just a speck hidden between waves, working tirelessly to breathe between the crests and kick and pull against the current.
Even though I kept repeating a mantra to myself—“I can do hard things. I am strong. I am able.”—throughout the two-and-a-half-hour swim, I often felt like I was moving backwards, making no progress against the expansive, rough waters.
My father, a gifted writer who often would share his feelings of pride or gratitude for his children via letters, told me exactly what he thought of my 2015 swim when he sent me a letter afterwards and said, “unique people do unusual things just because they could.” In this same letter, he told me how my grandmother crossed the straits on a coal-fired car ferry she occasionally got to captain, and how my grandfather would wait in lines more than three miles long just to cross the straits to go deer hunting, and how he himself used the ferries before there was a bridge to cross. When he signed off, “We are so proud of you,” it felt like the “we” he was referring to spanned generations of equally unique, brave, able, and strong people, and—as with most things my father told me—I didn’t take it lightly.
I buried my dad on October 18th, 2023. Ten months earlier, my mother had passed away unexpectedly. Thirteen days after laying my dad to rest, I had surgery to remove a large, non-cancerous but nonetheless painful and inconvenient mass in my calf. As I lay in bed recovering from the surgery and still reeling from the back-to-back deaths of my parents, all I could think about were my swims through the Straits of Mackinac. I would close my eyes and see the calm, peaceful water lapping against the shore, and then suddenly, the water would become choppy, dangerous, and dark.
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The rest of this story speaks of processing those difficult moments, drawing and parallels to open water swimming.
I also think that no matter how alone I may feel – in life’s waters, in grief, in healing, I’ve been so fortunate to have so many people who I know are there for me as I work my way across.
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