The summer my grandmother died was a hot, sticky, “lay in your own sweat because you have nothing else better to do” kind of summer. The doctors were hesitant to say that she only had a few months left, but once they told us she had Stage IV metastatic biliary duct cancer, we already knew. Soon, a milky cloud of jaundice would pollute her hazel eyes, and we’d resort to old photographs to remember what she looked like.
I was only home for about three weeks before I had to go back to Connecticut for my summer job. For those few weeks, I drove up to her house each day and hoped that my funny stories or pictures from college might be strong enough to cure the parts of her body cancer had destroyed. I wasn’t there during the earlier months when my grandmother’s health rapidly declined. But my mother was. She’d come home, exhausted, only to be met with a pleading gaze from our dog, who couldn’t understand that my mom had already expended all the selflessness she had for the day. When I returned in August, my mother told me that we would be driving to Maine. The purpose of the vacation was clear: a five-day escape from reality.
On the first morning of our trip, I arrived at the beach with the intention of writing something profound. Having pored over Thoreau’s essays for a class last semester, I turned to the outdoors with the expectation that, if I were patient enough, genius would undoubtedly descend upon me. In “Walking,” Thoreau promises, “There is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” I wasn’t so lucky.
The first obstacle—Nature exclaiming, “Turn back!”—was the minefield of rocks separating me from my desired vantage point of the beach. I could have simply sat down on the sand, sandwiched between the hairy man applying sunscreen to his wife’s back and the rambunctious six-year-olds violently knocking down their friends’ sandcastles, but that didn’t seem poetic enough. So, I put my faith in my five-dollar flip-flops and traversed the unsteady, slippery rocks leading up to the cliff. Each time a jagged rock stabbed my exposed toes, I promised myself that the view would be worth it.
Once I recovered from my treacherous journey up the cliff, I fished around my bag for my notebook—a water-damaged Moleskine that I impulsively purchased because it seemed like something that Joan Didion might carry. I filled the pages with mediocre musings about strangers on the street, speculations about my friends’ idiosyncrasies, and meditations on old pictures that I found in a thrift store—entries that would pale in comparison to the Great American Novel I expected to produce while sitting on the cliff.
And yet, I couldn’t seem to write about Nature without clichés. Each time I went to write a sentence, I froze in nervous hesitancy, unable to commit myself to my thoughts. The choppiness of my phrases uncomfortably poked at me, leaving more of a wound than the sharp rocks.
Defeated, I scoured the environment for a new spot to write my masterpiece. Since my first attempt at finding a secluded place to write was unfruitful, I tried another method: immersing myself in the center of the beach’s chaos. I trekked back down to the sand, back to the hairy man and the children with their toppled sandcastles. Plopping down on my towel, I resigned myself to observing, hoping that a scuttling crab or the whining of a tired toddler might restore confidence in my ability to capture the world on paper.
Soon, a group of gossiping teenagers lured me in. Under the guise of inspecting an oddly shaped seashell near their huddle, I crept closer to the group. Although their intermingling sentences and dramatic gasps masked much of their conversation, I managed to make out two words: beached whale.
BEACHED WHALE! This was it. It felt inexplicably literary. I could picture the beginning of a novel: a woman walking along a beach investigates a blurry shape in the distance. When she gets close enough to make out the gargantuan corpse, she is paralyzed with simultaneous feelings of despair and awe. I’d probably use this scene to set up some pretentious metaphor about the ephemerality of life.
Keeping a respectable distance, I followed the group of teenagers as they hurried over to the whale. It wasn’t a far walk, maybe 1,000 feet, but ginormous rocks shielded the corpse from most beachgoers, almost as if Nature were protecting its child with the privacy of a casket.
Before I even laid eyes on my subject, its sour smell wafted through the air and into my nostrils. It was unmistakably the smell of death. Without even seeing the body, I could picture the bloated, rotting corpse, waves washing over it as if it were just another rock on the beach. The teenagers ahead of me laughed, gagged, and held their noses, but I wanted to experience the full intensity of its death. Only then could I write something meaningful.
When I finally got close enough to see the whale, the first thing that struck me was its size. Facts from the Discovery Channel and high school biology primed me to expect a colossal figure splayed out on the beach like a fallen skyscraper. Instead, I was met with a shriveled, yellowing mass of blubber that couldn’t have been longer than twenty feet.
As humans, we typically become desensitized to tragedies the longer we sit with them. But the more I looked at the whale, the more shocked I became. How could the people around me have such little respect for life? What if it were them? What if they were dead and helpless on a beach with their skin peeling away and the stench of death emanating from their bodies?
What if people did this to my grandmother?
I knew they would in a few weeks. Isn’t that what a wake is, after all? A procession of curious strangers who tangentially know someone who died? Nobody wants to go to a wake. But when you walk up to the casket, a selfish curiosity overtakes you, and you feel compelled to look at the body, even if you don’t want to.
It took me two weeks to finally write about that day on the beach, and when I did, I felt like I had buried my moral code deep in the ground—a burial the whale would never know. A burial my grandmother would receive a month later.
