Death is an Ocean

Life on the near shore

Waking up 40 floors above the Waikiki traffic just as the sky begins to lighten Oahu, on the morning of my father-in-law’s memorial service, is an otherworldly experience. I slide open the glass door of the suite my sister-in-law got for us and go out onto the deck, where the height makes my knees melt. I sit in a patio chair and take in the surrounding towers, the little squares of light literal windows into other people’s lives, and the sweep of suburban streetlights that blanket the mountain.

I think about my kids sleeping in the other rooms, some of them here in Hawaii for the first time. They have a heritage here, a bloodline that goes back through this island and then back further, to another island on the other side of the world, to Madeira. It’s something we haven’t often talked about.

I cannot comprehend that Maile’s dad is gone.

I stare out at the dark water, at the whitecaps breaking far out in the Pacific. The faraway mountains, the breadth of the ocean, the permanence of death: all are incomprehensible.

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In 1971, a young woman went on vacation to Hawaii with a friend. She was from Ohio, with family in North Carolina, only 19 years old. Just a kid. When they arrived, she was instantly captivated by Hawaii . . . as well as by a particular 24-year-old Hawaiian man who worked in the lobby of the Rainbow Tower at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. He was tall and handsome with brooding eyes and a thick head of hair. He laughed and told stories and she was immediately taken by his big smile, his bigger personality.

The first night they hung out, a bunch of them went to a bar, laughing and free and full of that youthful exuberance, that belief that nothing could every possibly go wrong. She kept catching his eye. They started going out, and on their first date together, they went to Ala Moana Beach Park and sat in a lifeguard chair under a quiet sky. There was the enchanting sound of the waves, the smell of the ocean. This was most certainly not Ohio.

He wooed her with stories of growing up in Hawaii, of surfing when he was younger, of working in the pineapple fields. She learned more about his life.

When she returned to Ohio, they talked on the phone, built up $500 long service phone bills. Her mother thought she had lost her mind.

One year later, Kathy and Jim got married. My in-laws. Six years later my wife Maile was born.

Nineteen years later Maile and I started dating. Twenty-five years later, we started having children.

Now we’re 53 years in the future, 53 years since Jim and Kathy’s first date, and I find myself wondering about the infinite number of choices that lead us to this present moment. I wonder about that young Ohio girl, the odds of her choosing to stay with her friend in the Rainbow Tower at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, the very tower I look out on now from the balcony. What were the odds she would meet this young, Hawaiian man? He could have worked anywhere in Hawaii—why was he there, that very week, when a 19-year-old girl arrived from Ohio?

I wonder about the odds of two people getting together, then not falling out (or at least not seriously enough to break up). What is the chemistry that draws two people’s eyes to one another across a crowded bar? Across a hotel lobby?

Who made the first phone call? How did distance play a part?

Early on, when they had decided to get married, Jim had just recently been given a good job in Hawaii. A job that would allow him to support his family. But Kathy wasn’t so sure—her parents were older and not in good health, so the two of them made the decision to live in Ohio.

What if?

What if they had moved to Hawaii together in those early years?

My life would be a different thing entirely. Many lives would be.

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We find the canopies our family set up for Jim’s memorial service. It’s on Ala Moana Beach, not too far from the lifeguard chair where Jim and Kathy had sat on their first date. There’s a table holding things: photos, flowers, Jim’s urn with his ashes inside. A photo of him smiling, larger than life. Always larger than life.

After the service, there is food. In Hawaii, when you’re with Hawaiians, there is always food, impressive in both quantity and quality. The children run to the water to swim and paddle board, and some play football on the beach. Our kids meet their cousins, some of them for the very first time.

Leo playing football with cousins he just met.

We see likenesses in them: similar eyes, similar builds. Some share the same smile as each other—some have Jim’s smile, Jim’s hair, Jim’s aura. Gregarious. Vivacious. He was a magnet.

We pass the rest of our days there with our Hawaiian family, and we hold each other up. We eat more good food and jump off rock formations into the water off the North Shore. We drive along beautiful mountain ranges, the greenest I’ve ever seen, and never-ending pineapple fields, and we stop to eat at local favorites: Shimazu Store shave ice, and Ono-Ya Ramen.

We leave, and when Maile says goodbye to her sister, she cries. Jet-lagged and weary of heart, we return to normal life. To school mornings and take-out-the-trash and hit-snooze-on-the-alarm. “Did you do your homework?” and “Can someone please load the dishwasher?” Normal life settles on us, for the time being, like a heavy blanket.

In Hawaii, it seemed like Maile’s dad was right there with us—even though he was gone, we could see him in everything, in everyone around us. But here, in the fall foliage of Lancaster, PA, in the gathering cold and the dark mornings, he seems as far away as Hawaii. Further even. Because with death there is always that interminable ocean, dark and foreboding, something we can’t see beyond. Uncrossable for now. And while there is hope (“We do not mourn as those without hope”), there is also the inarguable reality of his absence.

This is where we must continue living, all of us, on this near shore, waiting and hoping.