A Father-Son Trip of a Lifetime

This, to me, was hilarious. But the crew didn’t really see the humor.

My father’s humor was among the things I loved about him most, and most assured me that he was mine. I remember him one time reaching for the binoculars to appraise a distant boat. He held the binocs to his eyes for several seconds before realizing that the lens caps were still on.

“My George Bush moment,” he said ruefully.

A little later, the first mate picked up the binocs and did the same thing.

“Caps are on,” my father said, knowledgeably, then flashed me a wacky, Bill-the-Cat face and the thumbs-up.

No one among the crew knew what to make of him. Most of them couldn’t be bothered. In part because he didn’t take himself very seriously, I think. As he aged, he had left nearly all of his vanity behind, and what remained was just his odd, awkward, funny self.

The contrast between him and the rest of the crew reminded me of one of my favorite stories, about how he met my mother. It was the summer of 1963, and they were staying in the same dorm at Syracuse University, where they were training for a two-year Peace Corps stint in Liberia. One night there came a knock on my mother’s door. She went to open it and found this handsome, square-jawed man standing there. She invited him in, and they were just getting comfortable when there came another knock, this one from the window. My mother turned to see a bottle hanging from a string.

At sea, time kept its own pace, and there was no rushing it. The great line of the horizon bound us like the rim of a clock. The eye settled on that line or just above, weighing the wide range of space.

“Intensely annoyed,” is how she later described her reaction. But also interested, despite herself. Apologizing to her guest — a perfectly agreeable young man, no doubt — she opened the window and retrieved the bottle, which contained a scrawled message from my father, whose room was one floor up. The specifics of the message are not remembered, but I have little doubt as to its content — just a funny little piece of my father. My mother didn’t know what to do with it at the time. But after reading it the conversation of her guest suddenly seemed much less interesting.

“I have a memory of her appearing at my door shortly thereafter,” my father recalled, “bottle in hand.”

Tatsuro Kiuchi

My father and I had often sailed together, but those first few days found us farther from land than we had ever voyaged. Yet even then, we still found ourselves dogged by errant bits of civilization. A bobbing neon glow stick. A mysterious black buoy, surmised by some to be a drug drop. These few minor intrusions, however, did little to disturb our first, deep quaff of emptiness. There was no end of air out here. No sirens, no billboards, no gas pump adverts. No text chimes, no checkout lines, no perky newscasters. No countries, even. Talk of politics was not allowed — this was one of the rules.

Most of all, there was no entertainment. Movies, TV shows, websites, always hurrying you on. As if time itself, or an awareness of it, were the worst thing imaginable.

At sea, time kept its own pace, and there was no rushing it. The great line of the horizon bound us like the rim of a clock. The eye settled on that line or just above, weighing the wide range of space. The space could be inhabited but never fully apprehended.

I had a great-uncle who was a sailor. He was a lieutenant commander in the Navy during the Second World War, but once the war ended he could never quite find his place in the world. He eventually became a drunk, retiring to his house on the Maine coast, gazing out at the cold ocean and slowly slurrying his mind with gin.

Uncle Bob owned a gorgeous 36-foot wooden yawl that he sailed across the Atlantic a few times with a friend. The story is, the moment he stepped on deck he would put the bottle aside and wouldn’t pick it up again until he stepped off on some French wharf. There was no need for booze at sea. At sea, there was nothing to escape.

Tatsuro Kiuchi

At 2 a.m., the alarm goes off and you rouse to the gurgling darkness and the rolling motion of the boat. You feel the life vest at your feet in a damp pile with your night sailing clothes. Drop from the bunk, gather the pile and stagger with it to the saloon. The captain may be sleeping there, a form beneath a sheet. Awkwardly dress and latch into the complicated life jacket, bulging with gadgets and sensors. Then up the companionway into the cockpit, where a dark figure stands at the wheel, and another in the cockpit, probing the night for boat lights. Murmured words are exchanged, and the one you’re replacing gratefully retires to his bunk. The other stays on for an hour, for the shifts are staggered.

Latch your life vest to the safety tether. Check the boat speed, wind speed, course. Check the electronics to see if any other boats are nearby and zoom in to see who’ll be keeping you company for the next three hours. Lastly, tilt back your head to take in the stars.

Beyond waking and dreaming there is a third state called sailing at night. The cool moon on your shoulder, bits of it scattered among the winches and stanchions and stays. The sea a hissing void and the darkness gritty with stars. The scale of things is no longer obvious. The mast no longer looks tall but among the stars the penduluming toplight glows like a small sun. Most shooting stars are no bigger than a grain of sand. And how big are you? You feel the hollow of yourself, a little divot in the waste.

Sleep was difficult, flat on our backs with our heads flopping to and fro with the roll of the boat, as if in denial of some nocturnal horror.

I could usually abide the first half of the night watch in a quiet, mindless observance. But gradually the tiredness gathered, until I could no longer keep my calculating mind at bay. How much longer? Then my father’s white head would bob up from the gloom, and we’d have the last hour together, talking in low voices behind the wheel.

We talked a lot about how he was faring. Sleep was difficult, flat on our backs with our heads flopping to and fro with the roll of the boat, as if in denial of some nocturnal horror. My father had the kind of pillow that rose up on either side and nearly smothered him, but it at least muffled the ceaseless borborygmus from the bilge. It was like sleeping inside a washing machine, and thus perhaps not so surprising that he often woke up bleeding from his hand or knee. The captain seemed to abhor the sheet stains more than the wounds.

My father never knew how these wounds started. Unused to the boat, he was always bumping into things, and his old skin always tore. After the first few days he developed a new mannerism of checking his body for leaks.

One night, the scar on his nose from the last basal cell surgery broke open.

“They’re going to have to shave it all off again when I get back,” he said with a despairing sigh. Then: “I should probably just jump over now. Hell with it.”

Humor was how he coped. But humor only helped when there was someone to share the joke. When our half-hour was up he was alone again with only his watchmate for company, and the equally humorless stars.

I wished there was some comfort I could offer him. There wasn’t, and as his son this seemed the worst sort of failing. I had given him two grandchildren, which I had hoped would help ease his mind. But this was not enough.

Immortality did nothing to resolve the terror of death. It merely deferred it indefinitely.

I remember the terror of death I felt as a boy. And my mother’s attempts to console me. “You’re going to live a long, long time,” she said. “And maybe by the time you get old scientists will have figured out how to live forever.”

Even to her, I think, this sounded feeble. Because immortality did nothing to resolve the terror of death. It merely deferred it indefinitely.

Since then I had lived with the goal of being ready for death by the time it arrived. It could not be beaten, but one could at the very least aspire to meet it with aplomb. With this in mind I was always dabbling with various sophistries and notions. Of these my favorite was the pasture metaphor.

The pasture metaphor came as an alternative to the predominant, linear view of life as a brief interval on an infinite timeline. The problem with the linear view was that it overweighted the senseless void beyond life’s terminus, and then propelled you toward that terminus with the singleminded ruthlessness of an automotive airbag test.

The pasture metaphor, by contrast, presented life as a self-contained, wildflower-scented precinct in time where one would always have jurisdiction. The pasture would always be there, and whatever else happened it would always be yours.

I once tried to share this idea with my father, in the hope he might cotton to it. But he immediately saw it for what it was, mere intellectual gimmickry.

His own father had died when he was in college. I often thought about what the loss of his father had meant for him, and suspected that he might not know. For how could he know what he had been deprived of if he never had a chance to experience it? Unlike me, for instance, he never had someone to angrily differentiate himself from. No one to high-mindedly condemn, benevolently forgive, and eventually recognize himself in. This was a father’s greatest gift. In just being there for you to love and hate he helped you recognize and make peace with yourself.

My father never had that. What he had was a scant handful of stories which he would rummage through now and then. His favorite was the same as mine: the story of how his father outmaneuvered his mother’s countless other suitors. In my father’s version, his father convinced the captain of the tugboat due to meet the steamer returning my grandmother from Paris to let him bum a ride and intercept her well before the steamer docked.

This story was, I think, among my father’s prize possessions. What he didn’t appreciate was how easily I could imagine him doing the exact same thing.

Tatsuro Kiuchi

Five days out, we crossed the longitudinal of the Cape Verdes and adjusted course due west, a heading we’d keep all the way to St. Lucia. By then we’d already had our first taste of the trades: 24-knot winds, prickling spray over the foredeck — proper sailing.

Why does the heart lift so? It is an old delight, one of our most ancient triumphs — not conquering nature, but riding it. With sails heaving out and lines creaking around the winch drums, you perch with a childish glee, like a boy on his father’s broad shoulders. There is no secret to how sailing works. It is only physics, yet it feels almost mystical, like the way the sunrise, with a blue flourish, makes the stars disappear.

The crew went quiet. No boats in sight, no floating glow sticks or mysterious buoys.

The crew went quiet. No boats in sight, no floating glow sticks or mysterious buoys. Every now and then a bird joined us, a shearwater or storm petrel — known also as a Jesus Christ, or JC, bird for the way it walks on water when foraging for food. One morning the watch team reported a night full of whales. You couldn’t see them in the moonlight, they said, but the depth gauge was stuck at 1 meter, and you could smell them to starboard, like seaweed when the tide goes out.

The day before, the first flying fish had floated aboard.

“A small one,” my father said. “A flying sardine.”

It would have made a good tattoo — a creature of two worlds, sea and air. An awkward creature, gamboling between.

On Gran Canaria we had talked about getting tattoos. Neither of us had one, or had ever been inclined. But bucket lists had a way of suggesting new entries.

Brainstorming hypothetical tattoo ideas was a fun pastime during those late-night vigils. The way I figured, a tattoo’s off-putting ostentation could be neutralized if you regarded it not as a message to others but rather a kind of reminder to yourself.

“Like what?” my father asked.

“I dunno. ‘Breathe’? So, maybe a lung?”

“I think mine would have something to do with water,” my father said. “A wave, maybe. … Or a boat being crushed by one.”

The talk was all speculative, so I was surprised when he came to me one day with an announcement.

“Just so you know,” he said, “I have my tattoo.”

He looked pleased with himself. This, together with the fact that he wouldn’t tell me his idea, meant that the game was afoot.

One day after lunch we ventured out of the cockpit to feel the sun and the breeze on the foredeck. There I shared what I had learned about the captain’s life story. For we were both interested: What explains a guy whose entire life figured in the top ranks of other people’s bucket lists? What did he know that we didn’t?

“I’ve always been astonished by people who know what they want to do from a young age,” my father said, “and then go ahead and do it.”

To his eternal discontent, my father was not one of these people. Like so many young men of a certain era he had wanted to be a novelist. After the Peace Corps, he got a job in publishing, and later debouched into public relations. Career-wise, it was a thoroughly respectable performance, but not what you would call mission-driven. Once he retired, my father began to feel the absence of mission more keenly. It was a helpless, frustrated sort of feeling, as if some final instruction had failed to be delivered. Life was extraordinary. But what were you supposed to do with it?

To his immense credit, my father was never bitter. On the contrary, he remained wonderfully and innocently and sometimes painfully hopeful.

I knew the feeling. But I at least had him to remind me that my nature was to some extent inescapable. In accepting his limitations — and his strengths, for that matter — I was more able to accept my own. It was hard to believe that he, too, wouldn’t have benefited from the opportunity to reckon with his own father’s place in the larger scheme of things.

To his immense credit, my father was never bitter. On the contrary, he remained wonderfully and innocently and sometimes painfully hopeful. I remember him being briefly galvanized some years ago by the discovery of a trove of negatives that his father had taken. He spent several weeks printing the negatives in his basement darkroom, scouring them for some trace of the imperative that he felt he lacked. But the photos were not especially remarkable, and I expect that his father was ultimately no different than either of us: awkward, set loose on this earth with no particular mission, prone to a cruel unease.

Sailing, though. My father had always loved sailing, and he was good at it. It appealed to his intelligence, his manual facility, his appreciation for detail — and spoke also to his need for grandeur and beauty without demanding that he supply either.

That’s why when he first mentioned the crossing I knew we had to do it. And because it could not possibly be more mission-driven — clearly defined, directed and rewarding. All the things that life so often isn’t.

It wasn’t until we were actually embarked, and every distraction had dropped below the horizon, that I began to understand how the missionlessness that he so lamented also informed so many of the other qualities in him that I dearly loved: his layered complexity, his misfit perspective, his wry sense of humor.

I think that this is often true, that people whose paths are not given to them find themselves redeemed in ways they could not have anticipated. Perhaps, I thought, I should suggest this to him. The young have always relied on their elders to guide them and affirm who they are. Maybe the old need this too.

Tatsuro Kiuchi

“You’ll know you’re really getting into it when you forget what day it is,” the captain had said when we first set out.

And it was true. Already the days of the week had dissolved. If the garbage wasn’t going out, there was no week, really. One watch followed another, one sunrise followed another, one sunset followed another. The sea was what you returned to, again and again. How are the swells, the cloud reflections, the contrast at the horizon? Chalk on silver, ash on cobalt, periwinkle on denim. A distant sail puncturing the line like a little white fang.

On flat seas the sun diamonds were ground finer. On rough seas, the sun shattered into larger shards. Mornings held new colors: cerise, lavender, teal. The looking became an activity, and we built our day around it. How is it now, now, now?

“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m beginning to miss green vegetables,” my father said one day.

“Not purple ones, though,” I observed, remembering the eggplants under the companionway.

“Not yet,” he said. “I’m not that desperate.”

The young have always relied on their elders to guide them and affirm who they are. Maybe the old need this too.

We’d learned a few things about sleeping. The optimal posture was on your back in the luge position, with a folded towel tucked under your downhill ribs and your hands tucked under your lower back. Thus propped, with elbows splayed, you could usually get a few solid hours without ending up on the floor. Even then some exertion was necessary. One morning I woke with a pain in my side, having pulled some obscure torso muscle from resisting the roll in my sleep. The biggest impediment to sleep was the watch schedule, which ensured that you could never get more than five and a half hours at a time.

One morning my father sat down beside me in the cockpit and, after pausing a moment, said, “I should tell you that I’m having a problem with my hand.”

Something about the way he said this alarmed me. The pause, first of all, and the unusually formal tone, which told me that he had composed the sentence, and consciously decided to go public with it, after suffering for some time.

My father did not, as a rule, complain. Sigh, yes — and profoundly — but by and large he endured. Partly this was character, partly constitution. He was the kind of guy who, even at 80, could put in hours of yard work, or construction on a tree fort for his grandkids, and then get knocked flat for three weeks by a common cold.

Generously handed the role of diligent son, I leapt into action, triaging him to the best of my ability, dispatching emergency communications to three doctors I knew, and relieving him of his kitchen duties for the day.

This last, I knew, was part of why he didn’t tell me earlier. He really, really didn’t like not pulling his own weight. In the absence of mission, duty acquired a pronounced importance.

“Don’t feel bad,” I told him later, after preparing lunch.

“It’s hard not to.”

“The only thing you’re not doing is cooking. That’s all, and I’m doing that for you. It’s an honor for me to do that for you. So, just accept that. Don’t let the hand win.”

“All right. I’ll try to adopt that.” Then, “Huh.”

On flat seas the sun diamonds were ground finer. On rough seas, the sun shattered into larger shards. Mornings held new colors: cerise, lavender, teal.

Later, in the bunk, where all bad thoughts kept their appointments, I realized I’d been a fool to say “honor.” It wasn’t honor. It was love. But “love” was a strangely difficult word to say.

Fatality. The news came tersely over the radio during the daily position check. A French boat, 43-footer. Three crew members on board, a father and son and a friend. Not clear which one of them had died.

In the days that followed, more details emerged. The three sailors had taken the northern route out of Gran Canaria, braving the low-pressure system in hopes of finding better winds. In this, they succeeded. The winds reached gale force, and, late one night, with the seas running to 15 feet, Max Delannoy, a 73-year-old Frenchman, was just coming on watch when a rogue wave turned the boat and the wind whipped the boom around like a hammer, striking Delannoy in the head and killing him instantly.

This was all very disturbing. Still, I couldn’t help feeling relieved upon learning that Delannoy was the friend, and not the son or father.

Tatsuro Kiuchi

10 a.m. on watch, 8.5 knots, no ship in range for the last 24 hours. Medium seas; tumbling, white-crested summits. Flying fish puttering into the wind like dragonflies. Boat walrusing through the foamy troughs.

All liquid and light out here. A splendid monotony. Same consonants as “mutiny.” The mind wanders. Internet searches never made: What was the speed of the Santa Maria? Who was Rube Goldberg? What are the lyrics to the second stanza of “Streets of Laredo”? What is the formula for tension? Who was St. Lucia? Who was Max Delannoy? Did he have a son? Did he have a tattoo?

No ships, but we had other company now. Squalls — anvil-shaped clouds, dark on the bottom. At night they blacked out the stars. Squalls could double the wind speed in a heartbeat, spin you in a circle and then eat your sail. You’d see them haunting the horizon like banshees descending on some less lucky innocent.

The bow parts the hours. Once more pivoting away from the sun, turning outward to the stars, from biology to pure physics. Swells rolling fatly under the stern, bellying into the gullies. Dinner arrives: lamb chunks on rice. Now in the bunk performing that slow drunken dance with the ocean, collapsed on each other’s shoulders.

At least my father’s hand was feeling better.

Another idea I sometimes entertained: Imagine that our entire lives were actually generous prizes awarded for something some other version of ourselves achieved in another, far more sophisticated dimension. In this view, life was a kind of congratulatory object, not unlike a dish of ice cream. It was, in other words, to be relished. Yet it would be absurd to assume that a dish of ice cream went on forever. By the same token, the most sensible way to conclude one’s life was the very same way one polished off a dish of ice cream. With a murmured “Mmm, that was good.” A sense of repletion, a troubled trace of self-disgust, perhaps, and a certainty that any more would be wasted on you.

At night, my father and I crouched behind the wheel. Shooting stars bright as lightning left burning furrows in the dark.

Funnily, this was in a way what the crossing began to feel like, after 10 or so days had gone by. Shifting around our little space like floe-bound polar bears. Trying not to count the days. The sun didn’t count days. What would be the point? There was no shore it hoped to reach. To go to sea was to dip into the eternal holding pattern in which most things exist. Was this what one went to sea for? To notice this? The grind of immortality?

Somewhere north of us, the Charlotte Jane II suffered a catastrophic steering failure. Later, in the head, I for the first time noticed a safety poster illustrating various emergency signals. I was struck by one of them. “White star rocket. Three single signals fired at one-minute intervals.” Better still the meaning, terse and obscurely moving.

“You are seen. Help is coming.”

Days and days and days unending. The temperatures rise. The tuna and dorado have been shrinking in size and number every year, Dan says. Meanwhile the flying fish are flourishing. A brown booby haunts the bow, waiting for the boat to scare them into the air. They land on the deck, goggle-eyed, bewildered. One morning we find 62, plucking them off like nits.

We ran out of honey, we rationed bananas. The first mate got testy when I dared to add milk to the porridge.

At night, my father and I crouched behind the wheel. Shooting stars bright as lightning left burning furrows in the dark. We were closer now to astronauts than to any other human beings. With everything so far away, it made you feel lucky to have your own dear moon so close. What else could it be there for but to keep us company?

My father shared stories from his youth. First sexual encounter — fumbling hands and whispered urgency in the middle of a darkened street one night in Montreal. Dancing on a dare with a European movie star at a bar in Germany, big band playing, mates gawking from the little table, beauty shocking to behold up close. Stalking around Edinburgh in a borrowed leather trench coat with a petite, exotic singer who called him “babe.” Him, a gawky Jewish boy from Norwalk, Connecticut.

“Had anyone ever called you that before?”

“No. Never before. Or since!”

Vistas opened. A tumbling sense of possibility. The wide sea before us.

Later, he told me that, no, he’s not completely satisfied with his life, or his career. It was not as focused or rewarding as it should have been. He drifted some, he said. Neglected his interests. Somehow they didn’t catch fire.

“I have this underlying restlessness or dissatisfaction,” he said. “There are threads I should have followed, opportunities I should have taken more advantage of.”

There was something helpless in his tone, something he still did not understand. It made me feel helpless, too. Can life ever be fully apprehended? Would Captain Dan subside contented when the time came?

It was my cue to say something. The kind of thing you would tell your own son, sitting on the edge of his bed at night as he looks to you for an answer. I reached for something reassuring yet plausible — erring perhaps on the side of plausibility.

“You do what you can with what you have to offer, and the result is your life.”

In the morning the sun domed up a pure burning orange. Three days to go. There was no escaping counting now. As we neared the end the boats began to reconverge. Two miles off the port bow, a ketch, sails catching light like the buildings of some distant, alabaster city, a Shangri-la. And by the time we reached it, this is what civilization would seem.

A day earlier, as I imagined lounging in a bathtub filled with cold beer, my father realized that he hadn’t given much thought to what he was looking forward to. Mostly what awaited him was not good. Another carcinoma excision. Radiation therapy. And after that, who knew.

His mood darkened.

Tatsuro Kiuchi

At last the day of arrival dawned. Sargassum weed lined our wake. New birds, little ones with black-dipped heads and thin wings honed sharp by the wind. By the afternoon we were all silent and watchful.

My father was at the wheel, white hair whipping in the wind, when land was finally sighted, a gray smudge — obliterated by a high wave but back again, persisting. 6:15 p.m., 16 days after leaving the Canaries. The captain requested that we keep our cellphones in airplane mode.

The smudge of land spread, the sun dropping directly behind it. By 7 p.m. the depth gauge had fallen from 1,000 feet to 90 feet as we crossed the continental shelf — the end of the Atlantic. A little smile started on one side of my face as I considered the nearing reality of a hotel bed.

Time slowed to a crawl. The sun ignited an orange line above the horizon. The swells settled and a fingernail moon rose, cupping indigo above Venus. The lighthouse on Martinique appeared, and then a liquid bed of lights.

“Do you know what land smells like?” Dan asked us.

We did not. We knew what whales smelled like. But we did not know the smell of land any more than we knew the smell of our own houses.

“You’ll know it when you smell it,” Dan said.

The land thickened, dark against the stars. As we rounded the headlands of St. Lucia a string of other peaks came into view. Someone whistled tunelessly. I felt very tired. It’s funny how tired I felt.

“For glory,” the first mate said, as we gibed around Pigeon Island.

Exotic sounds. Faraway music, barking dog, racing motorcycle engine … tree frogs.

Then the unmistakable smell of civilization. Of course. Burning, smoke. Carbon.

When I woke the next morning my bunk was oddly moribund, and I found this unexpectedly saddening, like waking alone after going to bed with a lover.

My father and I spent the day padding around the shorefront, bewildered by the habitable space and purposeful bustle. It was inexpressibly strange to be able to move around people without squeezing past them as in a movie theater. To let wanton water roar from the faucet. To put something down and know it would stay where you put it. To not fear door frames, which had spent the last two weeks assaulting you at every opportunity.

There were formalities that required our attention. Paperwork, visas, travel arrangements. And of course a heap of pointless email.

That night we went to a restaurant and, over revolting blue cocktails, I shared my latest conceit.

“Nothing else in the universe is capable of appreciating the universe,” I told Dad. “That’s the one thing we can do.”

“What if the universe needs us to notice it, because that’s the one thing we can offer? And what if this noticing were actually a kind of low-level monitoring? Like a long, drawn-out boat watch?”

My father groaned. Wrong metaphor.

“Where’s the consolation in that?” he said.

“Well, I think it helps to think of life as a kind of job. It puts you in relation with the universe, tells you how big to be, how big not to be. It assigns you a clear role. Your job is to monitor. To witness. Everything was so unwitnessed out there.”

“Where do you get these crazy ideas?” my father said.

“The point is, nothing else in the universe is capable of witnessing or appreciating the universe. That’s the one thing we can do. The universe is bigger than us, more important than us. And it’s OK when we leave it, because it will carry on.”

Tatsuro Kiuchi

That night I gave up trying to find the right thing to say. Most of what I ended up saying was just hand waving, anyway. The experiences we shared, all the jokes and the journeys, held far more meaning.

This was perhaps the best argument for the bucket list. To make memories to share. Even when my father dies I will still in a way be sharing those memories with him.

Which is maybe why, the day before our departure from St. Lucia, we found ourselves in the back of a crowded minivan, winding our way down the coast to a town called Castries.

The shop we sought was located on the second floor. The proprietor invited us in and handed my father a binder to browse. My father already had his idea but he couldn’t help perusing the options — a host of elemental imagery: roses and eyes and bones and butterflies and devils and ghosts and snakes and wings and daggers.

In the end he elected to go with the classic sailor’s anchor on his forearm, with the addition of three leaves winding around it to represent the family he held dear.

For me it was — what else? — the three white star rockets.

This I would bear on my chest as a kind of mute tribute. For we have all needed to be rescued at some point in our lives. We’ve all felt the animal fright of being totally lost and alone. Helpless. Then a familiar voice comes from somewhere, calling you. And instantly you are back, safe, running, smiling through tears.

Who is that original rescuer, do you think? Who is the one who sees you, saves you? Who is the one who loved you first? And how can you ever say goodbye?