Full Fathom Five: A Daughter's Search

PART III - Sea Change

III Sea Change 22 At the beginning of each semester, I try to “sell” my creative writing course— a core requirement that students, particularly those going into accounting, computer science, and other nonwriting fields, wonder why they have to take. I tell them that imagination is the key to empathy, even compassion, and if they work their imaginations like a muscle, as we plan to do in this course, they will be better able to understand people. I give examples of crucial types such as future employers, customers, spouses, in-laws, and so on. By imagining themselves in others’ (various characters’) shoes, they will develop people skills that can serve them in all walks of life. Now I can attest to this power of imagination with more conviction than ever before, because it’s brought a new presence to my life: Jim Coe. In having to imagine this man’s final moments, I was filled with his urgency and dashed hopes and—hardest to bear—his sense of failed duty as he heard the water crush his doomed ship. It was bad enough that he had to die; it was worse that he likely felt self-reproach with his last breath. I hope I’m wrong about it, but facing this worst possible state of mind not only made him vividly accessible but also taught me something I now bring to all my relationships : that this imagined psychic misery is harder to bear than any physical pain we can imagine our loved ones enduring. And so I better understand my daughter’s silence during a recession some years ago, when she had a hard time finding a job. The times she felt like a failure were the times she didn’t call. I’m grateful, now, for her sparing me and her dad. Writing Jim to new life in my mind has also taught me what my cousin Fred Niles wrote me at the beginning of this search: “Be happy,” he said, “as Jim would have wanted you to be.” I’m trying now to uncover whatever of Jim’s natural buoyancy he passed down to me, the happiness that the tension of my early years in a troubled household buried. I now try to reason my way out of negative emotions. If I can’t, I no longer spread them around to family 256 FULL FATHOM FIVE and friends.Talking about these feelings for the sake of openness, closeness, honesty, and so forth not only inflates the importance of what prove to be just passing states but also hurts my loved ones. Jim didn’t give much time to negative emotions. A vivid demonstration of this was the reaction of Tom Parks when I sent him a copy of a letter I wrote the Bowfin Submarine Museum in Pearl Harbor. I asked them to stop handing out a flier on Jim (that included his toilet-paper letter) because the writer referred to him as “pompous and belligerent.” Although Tom Parks agreed with my protest enough to write the museum a letter of his own (and the museum stopped distributing the flier), Parks then said that he didn’t mean any disrespect, but if Jim could know that he’d been tagged for all eternity as “pompous and belligerent,” he’d laugh. Pomposity doesn’t coexist with humor , Tom said, a fact that Jim was particularly aware of. This letter from Parks showed me that if Jim, with his vast responsibilities during the timeTom Parks knew him, gave the impression that he could laugh at himself for the way he was depicted, then I could certainly afford to lighten up. Jim’s good nature, plus the fact of his early death, made me realize that just being alive—let alone having peace and freedom—is a gift. Celebration, then, or at least a quick scan for the good, is a more fitting response than the cynicism and low tolerance for frustration that I grew up with. And so coming to know Jim Coe has offset the somber, inhibiting influence of the other father in my life. I now realize that associating Jim for all those formative years in my mind with sadness and loss was seriously misreading (and underestimating) his nature. He loved life, people, pets, music, and the sea. Certainly the war made him cherish these things even more. In aspiring to do the same, I am drawing closer to who I might have been if I’d grown...