Happy Birthday on the Horizon

It’s going on eleven years since my parents were killed. Most nights my dad comes to me in dreams.  He doesn’t really do much, just shows up and hangs around doing whatever I am doing in the dream.  I don’t dream about my mom much, but when I do she is always at the beach.  And she always seems happy. 

At first that didn’t make any sense to me.  My mother was raised on the shores of Northern Ireland and had almost died in a riptide as a child. She had a fear of the water and bathed in inches of water.  She was terrified of the ocean. So why is she always near the ocean in my dreams?

In real life, I only saw my mother at the ocean once. It was in Mexico and I’m not sure how old I was when we went there on a family trip. In the photos I was still a head taller than my brother and had a little girl body in my bathing suit.  

It was my first trip to the ocean. I swam out to the waves that would break over my body. The first time I was caught by a wave I felt like I had gotten caught in the spin cycle of a washing machine of epic proportions.  I was drowning, but fully aware of my coming demise.  I remember saying goodbye to my dog, my brothers, my parents, and my grandpa. Then the wave was gone and I was lying waterlogged in inches of sea foam and hard-packed sand.  I struggled up and went and sat on my towel by my mother.  She was reading a magazine.  I thought about telling her that I almost drown, but figured she wouldn’t let me back in the water, so instead I took a sip of my Pepsi and ran to the water’s edge to tell Kevin.  He had embraced being swept up in the waves and said it was body surfing and he showed me to turn to face the beach and then to paddle like mad to stay on top.  He was younger, but never had any fear.  

Our hotel in Acapulco had a swimming pool with a cascading waterfall at the deep end.  My brother came up with the idea of climbing to the top of it and diving off.  He coaxed me to the top to take my own plunge.  He even got my father to do it.  And talked my mom to come into the shallow water and we held her hands and let her use our swim floats.  She was shaking, but she sat on the steps with the water up her knees and splashed water over her arms and neck.  Kevin and I thought we had won a prize getting our mom in the water.  

That vacation in Mexico was my best childhood memory.  Dad used his Spanish to find us the best food and got us into places tourists didn’t go. Mom wasn’t cooking or cleaning or trying to get me to be a girly, girl.  She didn’t let her fear stop us from experiencing the seashore, or the epic pool. My brother was beside me, making me a little braver and pulling me into his adventures. That’s when I fell in love with the exact place where the sky meets the ocean. 

I realize that now when I see my dreams of my parents at the beach it is for my comfort, not theirs.  I see my dad deep sea fishing and my mom relaxing in the sun with the horizon before them, and I am at peace.

Maybe that’s what love does after it has nowhere left to go—it rearranges itself into something you can visit. Not as it was, with all its edges and fears and unfinished conversations, but as something wider, softer. A place where the things that frightened us no longer have power.

My mother, who once feared the ocean, sits easily beside it now. Not because she changed, but because I needed her to. Because somewhere in me, I am still that child coming up for air, still wanting to turn and say, Did you see that? Am I going to be okay?

And in these dreams, the answer is always yes.

She doesn’t have to speak it. It’s there in the way she faces the water without flinching, in the way the light rests on her shoulders, in the quiet permission to come closer to the edge of things.

Today, she would have been ninety-five.

I imagine her there—on that endless shore where the sky meets the ocean—unafraid, unhurried, and whole. And I understand now that the gift she gave me wasn’t just that one perfect trip, or even the courage to wade in. It was something steadier: the ability to return, again and again, to a place where love outlasts fear.

So I meet her there.

And for a little while, I am not missing her.