The Baby, the Cruise, and How to Stay Married

“The great lie of the ocean liner cruise is that enough pleasure and enough pampering will quiet this discontented part of you. When in fact, all it does is up the requirement…” – David Foster Wallace

She’s gorgeous and the best moment was my beloved son saying, “Mom, you can watch a YouTube video on how to hold a baby.” I, being a perfect mother did not respond with sarcasm or guilt inducing lists of all the labor [sic] involved giving birth to him (seventy-two hours of back labor). I smiled and said, “Thank you darling, maybe I will.” They are new parents with their Ming vase. My role is a wonderful mystery. How to be a grandmother is a manual I could use. I love her from a place I have yet to understand.

photo by Tom Donders

The cruise. Last night we were entertained by three men, one in a kilt, all bechained and leathered, who sang a medley of eighties rock songs a decade I fail to regard with affection despite getting sober in 1984. Before that I was in vast amounts of trouble precipitated by the sudden death of my oldest sister hit by a drunk driver as she crossed the street. My fledgling sobriety was not a worthy opponent for my longing for obliteration. I stopped because the fact of my suicide would have destroyed my already reeling parents. Instead, I located a man to marry, a miserable, violent man who I sensed might help solidify my deep belief I had no right to remain alive.

The second song this trio sang was Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven a song inspired by the death of Clapton’s four-year-old son who fell from a window of a New York City apartment in 1991 and died. My own son was born two years later and when the song came out it felt like Clapton had managed to express a type of sorrow that defied description. Since the previous song this trio covered was Axl Rose’s Sweet Child o' Mine, an anthem to a former girlfriend, the introduction of this ballad to a lost child seemed incongruous.

Grief is something I have a deep acquaintance with. The sudden death of my best friend at twenty and the aforementioned death of my sister presented the truth: you will never recover. It was never abstract. On a physical level I could not sleep or eat. I started fainting in public when not having spectacular panic attacks. Anyway, these three men had been, according to them, a great success in Las Vegas. The first husband, the terrible one, once called me from a business trip to Las Vegas, and said he was being menaced by very tall prostitutes. The movie Leaving Las Vegas filled me with horror as it depicts a writer drinking himself to death. I totally understood this urge to eliminate all impediments to self-destruction. But I got sober and decided to live.

Onboard, we have a twelve-step meeting daily at five o’clock in the evening. It allows for a level of intimacy beyond the frequent exchange of small talk centered on where you are from and how many cruises you have experienced. I rediscover my extrovert/introvert personality which welcomes the happiness of others in group experiences but requires isolation and inspires a certain level of cruelty in how I view my fellow cruisers and their penchant for piling food on plates in the buffet and the melodrama displayed by the ballroom dancers.

I sit on a deckchair and listen as a man with a Northern British accent monologues about human nature. He makes little sense but focuses on a theory of “more.” We all want more, he states. Except, I don’t and I’m human. Eleven days at sea reduces most of us to tolerate bad Los Vegas singers and people repeating clichés.

How to stay married while sharing a small state room and twelve days at sea? Not to mention two fourteen-hour drives. Be kind, eat a lot of chocolate and ignore his need to go smoke cigarettes on Deck Eight. Admire that man in his tuxedo and welcome his enthusiasm for being waited upon.

Creating out of pain is hard. Many view the impulse to compose or write or paint after the loss of someone as cold-blooded and opportunistic. In Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell, we are given the grief of the playwright father as inspiration for Shakespeare's creation of the engaging yet complex and troubled character of Hamlet.

“He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live. She will say all this to her husband, later, after the play has ended, after the final silence has fallen, after the dead have sprung up to take their places in the line of players at the edge of the stage.”

I gaze at this girl my son holds against his skin and ask a merciful force to keep him from the wisdom gained from unimaginable loss. 

– Molly Moynahan