Manslaughter Was Not In the Description of Our Teenage Caribbean Sailing Adventure

Handling the trauma of young (and old) death and learning to see it through

When my dad said he’d been talking with my best friends’ parents about sending us on a summer sailing trip through the British Virgin Islands, I was all in.

I was fourteen years old, and the notion of spending three weeks sailing through the Caribbean with a group of other teenagers as part of a fleet of boats, touring the BVI on a 50-foot schooner with two of my best friends, who wouldn’t want this?

It sounded fucking magical.

He added that the program was headed up by the same person who had led the now legendary trip my “brother” Steven took in the early 1970s. I never really knew Steven; he was an adopted son from my dad’s first marriage, dissolved courtesy of my mom twenty years prior, and, following years of criminal behavior, including grand theft and drug arrests, my father had disowned Steven by the time I came along.

The six-month sailing trip Steven took was meant to straighten him out. And it had worked… temporarily. It was a program for troubled teens and they had sailed the Mediterranean for six months. My dad often sang the praises of that time Steven spent on the boat, and he was “better” when he returned, but not for long.

In retrospect, while our trip was not meant to correct bad behavior, it was meant to be motivational. However, that part was downplayed on the initial sell.

When the small propeller plane landed on Beef Island, we were immediately to be thrown into the water for a swim test. Anyone who did not pass would be sent home. While this seemed somewhat draconian, it made sense. We would be surrounded by water for three weeks; we’d better know how to tread it.

The test was exhausting and we should have realized at that point it was just the precursor to what was coming.

During orientation, we were told we would learn new skills every day. There was a list of challenges, including windsurfing, knot-tying, scuba certification and the mechanics of sailing. We had to prove we had a solid understanding of each activity and would be tested and certified in sailing and scuba. Additionally, our roles aboard the boat switched daily, with each of us taking turns as chef, first mate, captain, etc.

Any hopes of a leisurely summer vacation were dashed in those waves.

The boats were divided by age and we were the youngest crew. We were the only three girls on our schooner; the other ten passengers were boys. At 13–14 years old, in some ways, this was the stuff of nightmares. We weren’t tweens, but were not full-blown teenagers. No one was sure of themselves yet. We were all awkward and with awkwardness, at that age, comes cruelty.

Two of the boys, Brent and Jason, were outright bullies. They were back home friends with a couple of the slightly older girls on another boat. At a year older than us, those girls were hot. In fact, it felt like all the other girls on all the other boats were those girls. On trend with tiny bathing suits, lithe, long, tanned limbs, sleek, sun-kissed blonde hair. For mousey-haired, average sized me, it was hard not to feel inferior to this untenable aspiration of womanhood.

One night, Brent, who had been ongoingly nasty to one of my friends, went so far as to pretend he was interested in her, acting sweet and playing chicken with her in an attempt to see if she would let him touch her there. She did not. The next day he returned to acting as though she disgusted him. It was all a terrible game. I am sure these guys were popular in their realm. It has never been clear to me why someone who behaves this way is deemed anything other than a dick.

There were three college student crew members that served as counselors; two men and one woman, all cut from the same, preppy, yet wind-swept, cloth. However, they did a pretty good job of keeping us in line without interfering in our interpersonal dramas.

We were awakened every morning before sunrise. One counselor, Paul, would wake us up by dancing around the boat with “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” blaring on a boom box. I still can’t hear that song without a rush of adrenaline. Not the good kind.

We sailed the chain of islands, sometimes stopping at busy ports, sometimes empty coves, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days. We went to The Baths, a rocky shoreline of massive, cavernous boulders on Virgin Gorda. We dived a shipwreck teeming with colorful fish and corals. But always there was this feeling of unrest, prompted by my early-teenage insecurities, “would I complete the latest challenge and be able to move on to the next one?” and feelings of inadequacies compared to the older kids, “I’ll never look like her.”

One night, we went ashore for a full moon party. There was a bamboo bar, a live reggae band and lots of people laughing and dancing in the sand. It was a welcome break from what then felt like constant drudgery. We put on our strappy summer dresses, our lip gloss, our Love’s Baby Soft perfume. We twirled, flirted and gossiped. Of course we weren’t allowed to drink, but, in retrospect, there was plenty of partying going on for the people that could.

At the end of the evening, we were transported to our sailboats via small pontoon dinghies. Back and forth they went until all the kids and crew were delivered to their respective boats. All the kids but myself, my two friends, a couple of the guys and one of our counselors. As the youngest, we were the last ones to be brought back. Not really sure about that order of operations, but that is just how it was that night.

While we were waiting on the shore, word came across our counselor’s walky-talky that there had been an accident. Someone not associated with our fleet, driving a small speed boat, had crashed into our dinghy full of kids headed back to the boats. One of the girls, Charley, was missing. They thought maybe she swam back to shore.

But she wasn’t with us.

Anxiety hummed. “Where was she?” We were then told to look along the beach in case she had been injured and was washed up by the waves.

Still, nothing.

Then they sent out the night divers.

We feared the worst.

Owing to the emergency situation, we remained on that shoreline, now dark and empty of revelers, waiting to get back to our boat and wondering what had happened to Charley.

We watched from a distance as the lights of the night divers bobbed in the darkness, eventually emerging and setting up a triage on one of the dinghies, out among the waves. We were told they found her. Beyond that, nothing.

I have no idea how much time went by while we waited, but it felt like days. When we were finally brought back to our boat, we suspected she was injured or… dead?

No one told us anything.

Our heads were swimming and we needed to rest up for what might be coming next.

When we boarded our boat, the boys were laughing and playing cards.

My friend and I awoke the next morning to sunlight streaming through our tiny cabin window.

No Wham!, no announcements of work to be done. Just silence.

In that moment we knew she was gone. The friend I shared my cabin with and I just started sobbing. We barely knew her, but it was the culmination of everything; the exhaustion, the unpleasantries shared with the boys on our boat and the now glaring fact that one of our fellow travelers was dead.

“I just want to go home!!” I sobbed to my friend, clutching the blankets of the tiny cabin bed.

That day, the man in charge of the program gathered us all together. He explained that a speeding boat, one of the people at the party, had struck our dinghy. They do not know yet if she was killed instantly or knocked unconscious and then drowned. Through tears, he told us calling her parents was the most difficult moment of his life.

It was the first time I had seen a grown man cry.

Now, as an adult, I can only imagine all the details of what that man must have had to endure, and what trauma he might still be suffering.

Then he told us that as much as he knew we all wanted to leave, we were going to stay for the remainder of the three weeks. We were here to learn life lessons, and this was one of them. We would all stay and see this through together.

I don’t remember much more of the rest of that trip. I know there was a small memorial service for Charley. I remember the relief of getting off the plane in our local airport, greeted by my friend’s mom and then rushing into my dad’s arms upon my return home, soaking his chest with my tears.

My first night home, I went to bed when the sun was still shining and slept for 18 hours. I was not overweight when I left but I lost 15 pounds in those three weeks.

I can’t put a number on what else might have been lost or gained.

That was my first brush with death. It was a situation where facing it was hoisted upon me, no choices available.

I say “brush,” because even though I was right there, it wasn’t touchable.

Since then, I’ve lost many acquaintances, but also my father, my husband and my only sister, all less than five years apart, all by the time I was 40 years old.

When my dad died, I was faced with a choice; after years of Parkinson’s induced dementia, a man who was once Chief of Staff in the hospital where he now lay dying, being fed through a tube, never able to walk, talk or eat again, could be rehabilitated to remain in that state, or allowed a peaceful death.

Several years prior, myself, my dad and my older sister were together when he crafted his directives and, at the time, he was very hesitant, but ultimately concluded that he should not be kept alive if there was going to be no quality of life.

Even though (or perhaps because?) he was a cardiologist, he’d always feared death.

He’d been hospitalized for about a month at this point. Day after day spent at the hospital, wondering what would come next, moving from room to room, status changing, then stable, then changing again. “I just want to go home,” I sobbed on the phone to my fiance, the not knowing, ups and downs, hours away from my home and job, combined with the obvious circumstances, breaking me down mentally.

But I couldn’t go home. This was a life lesson and I had to stay and see it through.

As the days went by, multiple physicians he had worked with before he retired several years prior met with me and my sister to convince us to let him go.

The decision rested on my 26-year-old shoulders. My sister, about 20 years my senior, was a wreck and told me she couldn’t make the call. I had to do it.

Within a few hours of deciding it was time, he was swept away to a room in a nearby hospice facility. On the heels of the hospital sterility, this room looked like a comfortable apartment, complete with carved wood furniture and floral upholstery. There was a screened-in patio under a cluster of oaks. Even though he hadn’t smoked in years, we thought, if he resurfaced at any point in his dying and asked for a cigarette, there was no harm in this. He could enjoy it on the patio.

The room was a tangible sigh.

A comfortable place for the next phase of waiting.

The hospice nurses talked us through each stage of his decline, letting us know what was going on and what was coming next. He went from occasional, indecipherable mutters to complete loss of consciousness, the only changes being the patterns of his breath, which became a language unto itself.

We played Gordon Lightfoot and Norah Jones while my cousin wrote my dad’s obituary.

All of us took turns laying next to him in the narrow bed, saying the kind of goodbyes that Charley’s family never got.

I hope he heard them.

I had left for the night when he chose to let go. They say this is fairly standard, waiting to die until the loved one has gone. There are many explanations for why, but no one really knows.

The waiting was over and now came the grief, cascading in a torrent, then ebbing and flowing for the rest of time as only grief does.

There was no goodbye when my husband died, nor any for my sister. Both of their deaths were immediate and unexpected.

I would gladly wait a thousand waits to have gotten that chance at closure.

Sometimes I think about Charley and wonder if her friends and family ever found any closure in the wake of such tragedy.

My life has shown me Waiting, Death and Closure are crewmates, and Grief is the captain.

Waiting hoists the mainsail while Death steers. Closure waits her turn at the wheel, never knowing if Death is going to back down enough to give her a chance. Grief runs the show, occasionally sitting back in her seat, calmly watching the others scurry across the deck.

Together they forge ahead, somehow knowing even when they just want to go home, this is their lesson and they must see it through.