Jon Boat

On processing grief

I bought a boat.

It’s not as grand as it sounds — just a flat-bottom 1442 jon boat and a rusty old trailer with lights that don’t work. I bought it second-hand off Facebook Marketplace with some help from my daughter’s boyfriend, who haggled the price down by almost half.

Thursday afternoon, I met the guy at the bank to have the transfer of title notarized. (The clerk listed my husband as the primary owner despite me being the obvious purchaser, but whatever.) Afterward, we hitched it up and hauled it home.

I woke up from a nasty dream Friday morning, almost hyperventilating and in a cold sweat. I was at my father’s funeral, attempting to smile and act normal. Then, the reality that he was gone hit me, and I ended up curled under a table, weeping uncontrollably in a puddle of snot while people in the room continued to chit-chat all around me.

My father’s been gone for more than 8 years.

And that is not at all how I behaved at his funeral. I managed to look normal and even occasionally smile despite how tortured I felt inside.

But there’s a jon boat parked under my bedroom window.

And maybe it’s just a flat-bottom boat. But maybe I’m trying to somehow paddle my way back to the serenity of those warm spring mornings when Daddy launched a worn-out boat from the Morris Creek boat ramp, and we would spend the day beating the banks with topwater plugs. The conk-la-ree of red-winged blackbirds played in the background with the gurgle of jitterbugs working on either side of the boat. That was the soundtrack of those younger, carefree days.

Those mornings were like meditation, a calm in what I then thought was my stressful school life. You can forget things when you’re on the water, pitching lures and rhythmically reeling them back over and over.

There was never any pressure for us to fill the silence with conversation. We were both content to share 14 feet of space, lost in our own worlds, with the sun beating down on us, reflecting off the water, and burning faces tucked under ballcap brims.

Words fail me now as I try to capture the peace of those days while stuck indoors, tapping away in syncopated beats on my laptop keyboard, my father dead and buried.

But there’s a jon boat parked in my backyard and warmer days on the way. I fully intend to paddle my way up a creek and beat banks with a buzz bait.

There might be peace out there somewhere on the water, just waiting for me. I also know that I’ll be processing this loss for the rest of my life.

I’ll use the jon boat as part of the process.