Swimming through lockdown

Lockdown coincided with the start of miraculous spring weather. Getting outside has never been more important, and yet this joyous (and often noisy) sprouting of new life that I experience daily is a jarring contrast to the feeling of fear in a suddenly altered human world.   The birds are singing more loudly than I've ever heard them, the flowers in the hedgerows are so bright and fresh, and yet a virus is on the rampage, killing people daily. As usual, I find solace in the water. Instead of driving, I am walking to my special places on the River Dart, uncomfortably realising what a lazy and polluting thing I am in normal times - driving to places that only actually take 40 minutes to walk to.   I went to visit Felix and found the daffodils on his grave had flowered, along with snakes head fritillaries and cowslips. 

The water, my companion

It's such an age since I've updated this blog. Felix's death has been so utterly life-shattering that writing about swimming just doesn't seem that important any more.  But actually I think it is important to say that it is a tremendous solace and has helped keep me going in the two years since he died. Whether it's in river, lake, or sea, taking the plunge soothes my mind, distracts me and, quite simply, makes me feel better.

Mad march

It's the 18th of March and it's snowing.  Our second whiteout in a couple of weeks.  Crazy weather and this month has generally felt a bit crazy.  It was the first anniversary of Felix's death on the 8th/9th, and I was transported back to that horrendous week when I discovered he had died.  I had gone to see him in a show in Leicester where he was at university, and he never showed up at our meeting place.  I raised the alarm, and went to his halls where I arrived to find an ambulance outside.   He was dead in his room.. A year has passed and in many ways I am still in shock and there are many days when I still cannot comprehend it, I still not quite believe this has happened. 

When I swim - and this is particularly true of swimming in the sea - I feel closer to him.   In the water my body is weightless and I feel detached from the world, like a spirit, an essence, which I suppose is what he is now. I need that feeling of separation, of absence from my new life without him, and to return to a kind of state where I am with him.

This week I have slept very badly and felt a particular urge to swim.  Ju and I went down to Hopes Nose. It was low tide and we swam off a little beach packed with grey pebbles streaked with pink and white quartz   The water clasped us in its coldness and I shut my eyes and felt the water, and felt my son.

Getting through Christmas

It's the end of Boxing Day and we did it.  We made it through Christmas without Felix.  I think I got through because a sort of numbness and disbelief set in again, like when he first died.  I had a sense of disconnection from the whole thing.  Perhaps it's because Christmas is all about age-old rituals and these rituals are strong and definite and bring into relief whatever is happening at the time. Here we were again doing things we always do at this time of year, getting a tree, going to Mass, eating turkey, singing carols, it just didn't seem possible that Felix  wasn't there.  Christmas highlighted and accentuated his absence, and I went into numb mode again. 
On Christmas Day we went to see him at his burial place which my brother James calls 'the green hill far away'.  Alex, Lucian and I stood there in the roaring gale and opened our present to him, and left him some mince pies under his tree.  Earlier I had had a morning dip with Yaara at Ladies' Pool, which was pointy-daggers cold, our limbs pricked by the icy water.  Today I swam in the West Dart, in a swollen, fast moving pool.  As my body entered the water I felt myself shrinking back to a sort of visceral essence of being, rewinding back to Felix when he was part of my body, part of me, grown from me. Momentarily I felt connected back to him, then there was nothing.

Finding new territory

Since Felix died I find it helps to find new places to go.  All the old places are full of memories of him, and it's good to visit them, but not all the time.  About two weeks after he died Alex and I went for a walk along the coast path west of Heybrook Bay, a stretch we hadn't walked before, and found a stunning lagoon.  It was the period in between Felix's death and his funeral,  a surreal and unreal time.  The magic of swimming in that lagoon was a moment of sanity in a miasma of madness.  I've had the urge to go back there many times since.

Visiting the dawn

Watching the sun rise is both magical and therapeutic.  You are drenched in beauty, and the inevitability of the sun rising and setting every day, whatever happens in our little lives, somehow puts things in perspective.  A couple of months ago I got up early to watch the sun rise on Dartmoor; it's something I've been doing on the anniversary of my mother's death for a few years, and now of course I've lost Felix it is even more important I do it, as a little act of remembrance and worship. Then a few weeks ago I went for an early morning swim with Amanda in Torquay (ok it wasn't dawn, we were a bit too tired for that) but there was such a sense of serenity out there, it was quiet and otherworldly and the sea held us in its gentle grasp.

The balm of the Dart

The River Dart upstream of Ashburton is so well known to me now it is like an old friend, and old friends provide comfort. During the last three months  I have been compelled more than ever to swim in its silky clear water, sit in its cascades and explore its beautiful rocky depths.  The Dart estuary, below Totnes,  I know less well.   It is a different personality, though of course related to its cousin upstream.   It slips in serpentine langour through the folding fields of the South Hams, gradually widening and becoming more saline as it gets to Dartmouth and the sea.   And now of course this bit of the Dart has even more relevance to me, as Felix is buried in Sharpham Meadow, one of those fields above the estuary.   When I visit his grave I often now go down to the river afterwards and swim below the meadow,  looking up at where he lies.