Daryl Wood's Blog

On my morning kayak I slowed down to look for the barrel. A few years ago as I reentered our bay I looked down and was surprised to see a large round barrel partially buried in the silt on the bottom. Most of the bay is rocky so it was luck or misfortune that the barrel ended up here where whatever journey it was on would grind to halt as the bottom claimed a part of it. I remember circling around and taking note of the location so I could point it out to others. Debris moves around on a big lake like Huron so it would be almost impossible to know where it started it’s journey.

Going on these many years I have looked for the barrel without success and again this morning, when the water was smooth as glass, I went back and forth over the area and didn’t find the barrel. I continued into the ‘big’ water past the safety of the reef (water was still there as well) and on my way back I did another search. No barrel in sight. And then I paused. I realized that I would likely always be looking for the barrel because I’d seen it once and the memory was firmly implanted in my brain. In fact, I might never go over that same spot without thinking about the barrel. It had been significant on the cruising day and would forever be in my thoughts whether I made that a conscious decision or not.

And so it is that in spite of happy walks with friends, meals together, projects, long bike rides, conversations, adventures, accomplishments, laughter, and tears, there will always be the memories of my beloved Doug in just about everything I do, even the things he had never done with me. If I can be so amazed that a barrel on the bottom of the lake has stuck with me all these years it can’t be a leap to search for Doug around every corner in every area of my life. He was, for 25 years, enmeshed with my own being in a way that suited us both in the face of joy and sadness. We were, as Mary-Frances O’Connor details in The Grieving Brain, connected on a much more physical level than even we knew.

Perhaps today you will notice what remnants of your own past have secured themselves in a way that brings comfort or at least a jolt to awaken awareness.