Reentry - or, the Grief Stages are Real
Drinking a Presidente out of a mola coozie
Reentry after cruising can be really tough, even if the return to a world most people can relate to is a planned one. We did this after our first cruise, when we’d eked out an extra year of our post-college boondoggle of a honeymoon. Three years of cruising the Eastern Caribbean on Calypso, our 28’ Bristol Channel Cutter. I was more than ready to come back to “reality.” I longed for life with a car, with air conditioning, with a freezer.
The pace of life astounded me. How can people move that fast?
There are times when cruising comes to an end and it is planned. Expected. Longed-for, even. And there are times when cruising comes to an end and it’s planned and it’s crushing. (That there are also times when cruising comes to a crushingly unplanned end is a whole other conversation.) While it’s obvious that one is harder than the other, there are some unexpected basics around re-entry that are universal, at least in my experience.
Cruising is tough, there’s no doubt about it. The physical existence. The challenges around simple chores like shopping and laundry and even flushing the toilet. The space and lack of privacy and constant need for vigilance about things like weather and holding and neighbors.
These are all aspects that people “back home” just don’t get. Their understanding of cruising is one from movies and magazines, ones that involve beaches and hammocks or pirates and 50-story waves. No matter how long you’ve been out, their lives have continued in the same routine of soccer practice and traffic jams, waiting for the cable guy and worrying about how effective the tick repellant will be for the dog this year. They may mean well, and welcome you home with open arms, but their main questions will be about storms and pirates and sharks. They might ask how you stayed awake all night every night, or how you managed to feed the family since you were never on land (there is a misconception that going cruising means never setting foot on land, that somehow you just keep sailing the whole time). And then they lose interest.
When we returned from 10 months in the Bahamas, I figured it would be fine. This was, after all, our second re-entry, and this time we’d only been gone for a relatively short period of time. We were coming back to a familiar house, a familiar neighborhood, a familiar school for the kids. Unpack the bags, collect the pets, and life goes on, right?
I’d forgotten how fast life is on land. I’d forgotten how scheduled it was. Our daughter slept in our room for the first month, not because she was nervous or clingy but because for 10 months we’d lived within 30 feet of each other and she liked that. The house felt cavernous and echo-ey and stiflingly small at the same time. We missed the sunset routine of relaxing in the cockpit, searching for the green flash.
The first time I went grocery shopping after our return, something I thought I was excited about – getting everything I want? What? - I broke down in tears in the tomato aisle. I’d just spent months living in a place where if you saw one kind of tomato in a can, you bought it and celebrated. How on earth can anyone choose between diced and whole and stewed and fire roasted and puree and sauce and paste, let alone all the different brands? Why is this important?
We’d kept a blog while we were gone, and the kids sent regular updates to their classrooms, but there is so much about cruising that is best explained in person. We threw a pizza party and invited whoever wanted to come, bracing for the onslaught of questions.
“What about pirates?”
Pirates?
“Weren’t you scared of hurricanes?”
This is why we went when we did, in the off season.
“Did you just sail around all the time?”
No, we anchored most nights. A night at sea was a rarity, something we did maybe 6 times in the 10 months.
And that was it. Someone else fired off a question about soccer practice, or what teacher they hoped the kids would have next year, or what happened at scouts the week before. Face it. Nobody wanted to hear about our adventure, probably because they had no way to make it real for themselves. While we were searching out laundromats in the Bahamas and building sandcastles, they had been busily living their regular lives back home, shoveling snow and picking paint colors. The shared vocabulary of suburbia didn’t apply anymore, and nobody seemed interested in learning a different language.
The best times were when we were at the yacht club, talking to sailors and friends who could get it at least in some way. They may not have escaped for any longer than a week at a time, but they could envision our lives. They could dream with us.
I spent long hours emailing with friends still out there, desperate to have conversations with people who got it. People who could appreciate the joys of a flush toilet, the terror of life on the highway after life at 5 knots. People whose trials and tribulations (provisioning! Engine troubles! Making the bed on the boat! Laundry!) made sense to me in a tangible, real-life way. Slowly, I reacquainted myself with life on land. That didn’t mean I had to love it, and at first I really didn’t.
We just took 10 days and sailed with our friends on s/v Totem, and I will tell you the re-entry from that 10 days has been every bit as rough as the one from the year-long cruise, minus the conversations about pirates and storms. People can more closely relate to the idea of taking a week off – that’s a vacation length that fits into their world view – but I’m still surprised and a little hurt that so few people have asked about the trip. It feels life-changing. Isn’t that visible from outside?
I felt clumsy driving the car. I looked around our house and wondered why we have so much space. The grocery store felt massive. My daughter sobbed in my arms as she looked at the work she needed to do, the “just get through it” feeling she had on land. As inane as it sounds, coming “back” from cruising is a grief process. And it hurts.
What has helped? Reading posts on Women Who Sail from women who are also grieving. Going through pictures from the week. Talking to friends who are out there, who were once out there. Writing about it. Processing through it while acknowledging that yes, the grief is real and it’s okay to be feeling it.
My daughter said it well when she said, “It’s totally not fair to have something and not have it.” She paused. “But it’s more not fair to not ever have it to begin with.”
Maybe part of my grief this time is that our next cruise is so close I can taste it. That the 10 day interlude was a sharp underlining of how right our decision is. Now I get to live my life on land, trying hard to be present for the process.
See you out there.