Robert Breen

I came across a journal entry I wrote on this day ten years ago. I was reflecting on the people in my life that made a difference on how things have turned out for me. I realized that many of these people couldn’t possibly know the impact they had on me and the countless others they helped.

I kept thinking about this one community college professor who did more than anyone to inspire me to pursue a college degree. I thought how sad it would be if he never knew the difference he made. So after a quick search on the internet, I found him. I wrote him an email. I introduced myself and told him a few stories about how he had challenged and inspired me, how he had helped me forge a path to the person I am today.

And he wrote back:

I wish I could tell you what a joy it was to receive your message today. I had been to a “Lives of Commitment” breakfast, and - since I’m just about to retire from teaching - I was in my office thinking about how a person ‘makes a difference.’ Then - voila! - your message comes up on my screen. Thank you.

I went to class and told my students to write to their teachers. I told them that a letter like that can really make an impact in a person’s life. I told them about your letter.

If you have someone that’s made a difference in your life, like a special teacher, write them an email. Tell them a story about how they helped you. It doesn’t have to be long. Just say thank you. And then do everything you can to pay that help forward.

Grieving the loss of a child is a journey through wastelands you never expected to cross. Unlike every other challenge you’ve ever faced, there is no easy way through a loss like this. You stumble and fall. You curse. You are hobbled and bloody. You are not sure of the way. You might be going in circles.

The truth is everyone suffers in this life. It’s our lot to take the awful with the beautiful. We all must face it. In a perfect world, your mom wouldn’t forget you in the fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. You wouldn’t lose a dear friend to cancer in the prime of her life. Your son wouldn’t die in a motorcycle accident before his twenty-first birthday.

In the months before we lost Connor, we crossed a high wire of reinvention. We retired from our careers. We sold our long-time family home and said goodbye to a lifetime of friends on Vashon Island. We bought a winter home in Arizona with the half-sane plan of living a life split between the summer sea and the winter desert. For half the year, home was where we’d drop the anchor.

Reinvention might come easier for some. I felt like a reluctant hermit crab who knows he must shift to a new shell to survive but dreads the transfer. The plans were years in the making. And just at that vulnerable juncture between one shell and the other, that final letting go of the safety and security of the familiar for the heady promise of a new life, a tsunami upends everything, stranding this naked, scared crab, its tiny claws raised as if to fight the wind and water and waves.

And yet, life continues. We settled into the new house in Arizona. Little bursts of joy came from unexpected sources: the convenience of curbside trash and recycling, reliable high-speed internet, and kind, welcoming neighbors. I unpacked the sixty boxes of books that make up my library, caressing each volume, inhaling its scent, remembering its message as I slowly rebuilt my sanctuary, my illusive shell.

Reading has always been a solace. I read a lot of history and philosophy these past months: the marvels of early Egypt and the brutality of Ancient Rome in Will Durant’s grand opus, The Story of Civilization; the millions of years of Earth’s geology poetically taught in Basin and Range by John McPhee; and the insignificance of our human existence in a careening, infinite universe in Probable Impossibilities by Alan Lightman. Taking a dispassionate view can ease the sting of personal loss.

We sold MV Indiscretion this spring, saying goodbye to trawler life and our ties to the Pacific Northwest. I have let go of so many layers of my identity — business professional, islander, sailor, son to my parents, and now father to my son — that it felt right to reach back to utter beginnings, where I might remake myself, like Gandalf after his plunge from the Bridge of Moria.

We bought a small off-road capable RV in April and have taken a few trips to explore the deserts and mountains of the Southwest. In June, we crossed into Mexico to camp on the shores of the Sea of Cortez. These months in the desert were the longest I’ve strayed from the ocean in my entire life. I missed the smell of the sea and the feel of dried salt on my skin. We waded in the warm surf, feeling once again that indescribable joy of shifting sand under our heels and between our toes while flocks of pelicans dove for their dinner a few yards from us.

I sat beside tide pools nestled within the rocky outcrops that lay between long stretches of sand: hermit crabs battling to defend their territories, starfish, sea stars, sea slugs, mussels, sea urchins, and tiny brine shrimp, all pursuing the minutiae of their daily lives. Looking up into the cosmos and down into a tide pool, I noted the parallels: we are all one.

A strong south wind picked up one night, and gusts gently rocked the RV on its suspension. I emerged from a heavy sleep to check the anchor, trying to remember how far we were from the rocks on shore. I drifted back to sleep, still dreaming we were afloat. I know the sea beckons on the far side of this wilderness.

After a long period of intentional isolation, I have begun the process of reconnecting with old friends and making new friends here in Arizona. This has been difficult for me. They ask me how I’m doing. Am I OK? I don’t have an answer. “What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step,” said Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Every day, I take a step.

I’m writing this tonight from a small campground in southern Colorado. We’ve been traveling for a few weeks, taking the backroads, stopping often, seeing where the open road takes us. We have no plan, no definite time to return. It feels good to roam.

Driving through western New Mexico, I felt a lightness I didn’t expect. The beauty of the colorful mesas and buttes rising around us filled me with awe. We hiked to La Ventana Natural Arch to find ourselves in an ancient, sacred place — a place of prayer and hope and resilience. It left me wanting to see more, to do more. For the first time in many months, my mind tilted forward, a blessed release from so much focus on the past.

Every day brings a little more joy and a little less sadness. On good days, I see a brightening just over the horizon. A clearing? Yet there are still those days when I sink deep into sorrow and recognize the false dawn. There is no way around this, only forward, across this barren terrain. One step. Then another. When I dare look around, I see so many others walking beside me. Grief is the price we all pay for love. Won’t you take my hand? It won’t be long now. If death has taught me anything, it’s that nothing persists, not even grief.

The post The Wastelands appeared first on Robert Breen.

This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. I’m sharing this partly because I hope that releasing these words will provide some catharsis from the excruciating pain I have carried around these last months. Perhaps the sentiments I’ve conveyed here can be a small comfort to someone who has experienced a similar tragedy. I also know that people are worried about us, about me. Consider this an abbreviated journal of our past one hundred days. Unlike anything else I’ve written, this one contains no epiphany, enlightenment, or happy ending. This one is mired in the messy middle of heartbreak and loss.

On the night of September 27th, our son Connor died in a motorcycle accident in Colorado Springs. A car pulled out in front of him on a busy street a half mile from his apartment. He was killed instantly in the crash. He was riding a motorcycle he had owned for just one day. He was twenty years old.

I mentally replay the call we received from the coroner’s office in the wee hours of September 28th over and over and over again, my mind trying to push this all away, to wake up from the darkest, longest nightmare of my life.

I look back at that person I was on September 26th — that carefree soul with so many blessings — and compare him to the person I am today: darkened, sorrowful, broken. The two of us could be long-separated brothers, but a world apart in life experience. I no longer recognize that other me who swung so happily from the thinnest of threads, not understanding his entire world could crumble in the space of a single heartbeat.

Lisa and I have faced our share of grief together. First her mom, then mine. Her dad, then my dad. With each of these losses, one of us was always the stronger one, there to hold the other, to give comfort, to listen. This was the first time in our marriage that neither of us was strong enough to hold up the other. Thankfully, dear friends joined us on the boat to help us make it through the day, make travel arrangements, encourage us to eat, and simply hold us. I am forever grateful to these friends who also lost a near-family member for their love and help on that hardest day.

When the shock wore off and grim reality set in, we rallied as a family to do what we must. Our daughter Mallory took a leave of absence from work and joined us in Colorado Springs to help with Connor’s arrangements. During breaks from our awful tasks, we hiked the hills that he loved. We hungered for stories from his friends about his last days, his last night. We splashed the healing waters of Manitou Springs on our faces, needing their restorative powers to give us the strength to finalize the affairs of such a young life, a life so wholly intertwined with ours that we struggled to find where he ended and we continue.

We returned to Seattle utterly bereft. Unable to face the grief and sorrow of others, we stole away for the San Juan Islands aboard the trawler in an attempt to regain our equilibrium. Connor spent his entire life around saltwater and boats. We knew that if there was any way for us to find peace after something like this, it would be on the water. We could feel his presence in every anchorage, every trip ashore in the tender, every meal around the saloon table, every sunset and moonrise. Visiting these familiar islands over those two weeks was both a comfort and an agony.

We returned to port steadier but still reeling. We held a small gathering of Connor’s closest friends to mourn his passing. I was surprised and grateful that so many made the long trip from Colorado to Vashon Island to attend this memorial. It took everything I had to talk with others about my son in the past tense. There were tears but also smiles and laughter as we collectively remembered his life and the impact he had on all those around him. It was the first time since his passing that I remembered him with more love than pain.

Link to Connor’s memorial tribute video (six minutes)

In November, Lisa and I drove south to Southern California. We took the coastal route, stopping frequently to gaze at the ocean, to feel the pounding of surf, to take in giant lungfuls of healing sea air. Lisa took this same route in reverse with Connor in 2020, when his university in Colorado Springs closed down because of COVID. She pointed out the places they stopped and the sights they took in together, as if a part of him were still there, waiting for us.

We stretched a three-day trip into a week, knowing somehow that it was important for us to linger. We are feeling our way through this. There are no charts, no waypoints to follow, only instinct, love, and shared grief.

I poured my sorrow into a journal each morning and night to help me make sense of what had happened. You can trace the first stages of grief in those early entries: shock and denial, the second guessing and what-ifs, the heartbreak and rage at the universe knowing that Connor would miss the most beautiful aspects of life: falling in love, finding his path, becoming a father himself one day.

On Thanksgiving morning, I forced myself to write what I was most thankful for as Connor’s father. I wrote how grateful I was to have had the chance to be his dad, that I took a sabbatical from work to spend more time with him and his sister as teenagers, that he was able to squeeze so much life and adventure into his twenty short years, that he died doing something he loved.

Luckily, we spent Thanksgiving — our first holiday without Connor — surrounded by the comfort of extended family and the welcome chaos only small children can bring to a home.

In December, we moved into our new winter home here in Arizona. The sunshine and change of scenery from our life on the trawler have been a welcome change. Mallory and her partner drove from California to spend Christmas with us. We tried to be festive and honor Connor’s memory on a holiday he dearly loved.

As I write this, It’s been one hundred days since he died. I cringe at these words — their harsh reality, their certainty. There are moments, sometimes whole hours, when I forget.

The nights are the worst. I wake most mornings with tears in my eyes. My subconscious won’t accept the truth. It’s as if I’m learning, again and again, the facts of this unbearable loss with each new day. My son is gone.

If Lisa rises before me, I approach her quietly, softly, like someone waiting for word in a hospital lounge, anxious for a loved one whose prognosis is not good. “How did you sleep?” I ask her out of kindness, but I already know the answer. I wonder if these splinters that keep stabbing us will ever wear down to mere rough edges.

I looked to the ancient sages who did so much to shape how I live my life: Epictetus, Seneca the Younger, Marcus Aurelius. Their counsel when I was young helped me reconcile our universal longing for permanence in this short life we are given. I tried to apply their teachings to what happened to Connor, to regain my Stoic footing, but Memento Mori feels so hollow and pointless when I consider the death of this young man whose life had only just started.

I’ve never been religious, but I suddenly ache for the certainty and hope the faithful possess. I have listened to Mozart’s Requiem dozens of times these past months. Though I don’t understand the Latin, there’s something universal in the music that communicates comfort and awe on a spiritual, perhaps even molecular level. Since Connor’s death, my uneasiness with mortality has softened. I look forward to the chance, however slim, of seeing my son again, and if not, to know at least that we’ll be together in that vast universal void.

Our plans to cruise the northern reaches of British Columbia and Alaska next summer aboard our trawler feel somehow awful, as if our fairy tale life could possibly continue after such a loss. I feel like making a new start in the desert, to follow the dirt roads and mountain passes where Connor found such happiness in the last year of his life, to cauterize this paralyzing sadness and emerge somehow transformed, reformed, like Phoenix from the ashes.

I remain a proud father to my beautiful daughter Mallory, who inspires me daily with her kindness, intelligence, and generosity. There were days when she was my lifeboat, the one who pulled me to safety from the wreckage. After all those years of holding her hand, she held mine. We need each other more than ever now.

And I have my Lisa, my best friend and soulmate. We may look at the world through different lenses and leverage different strengths, but we never waver on the big things — what’s most important to us and our family. We’re apart for the first time since we lost Connor as she celebrates the birthday of her grand-nephew in Los Angeles. I miss her dearly. We’re two leaning pillars that can only stand upright because of the other’s weight and support. I like to think of myself as mentally and emotionally strong, but I know this: she’s the reason I’ve maintained my sanity through this ordeal. Without her love and support, I don’t know where I’d be.

A family friend who suffered the loss of her 24-year-old son called us shortly after Connor died. Her loss was still very fresh — just three months — but she was strong enough to help us in a way that no one else could. She understood exactly what we were going through.

One stranger who understands your experience exactly will do for you what hundreds of close friends and family who don’t understand cannot. It is the necessary palliative for the pain of stretching into change. It is the cool glass of water in hell. 

— Laura Mckowen, We Are the Luckiest

She recommended a book that helped her: Finding Meaning by David Kessler. In his career as a grief counselor, Mr. Kessler helped develop the now-famous five stages of death and dying, and tragically suffered the loss of his 21-year-old son before writing this book.

Reading this book did help me. I began to see that what happened to Connor, though horrible, wasn’t that rare. Many, many parents have gone through this same torture of the loss of a child, some much younger, or through circumstances riddled with regret and even more heartbreak. I learned that the agony of grief is equal to the devotion and love you had. It’s no surprise that I am utterly gutted. I loved that boy so much.

About three months after Kessler’s son died, a colleague sent him this note: “I know you’re drowning. You’ll keep sinking for a while, but there will come a point when you’ll hit bottom. Then you’ll have a decision to make. Do you stay there or push off and start to rise again?”

And that’s where I find myself today: at rock bottom or very near it. I too have a choice to make. Will I stay down here to flounder? Or will I swim for the surface? A part of me knows there are many magical moments yet to be shared with family and friends, to begin again to appreciate the everyday joy of life. Will I ever again choose joy? I hope someday I can.

Thank you for reaching the end of this meandering post. If you made it this far, you must either really care about me and my family, or you’ve been part of a similar tragedy yourself and are looking for some comfort. If it’s the former, I am grateful for your concern during this most difficult time. If it’s the latter, I hope you find peace in your own way, and in your own time.

The post A Father’s Grief appeared first on Robert Breen.

If the first half of life is about growing and accumulating, then the second half must see us disbursing, letting go. Life is full of cycles — like the seasons, or perhaps more dear to me, the flooding and ebbing of tides.

In the past few years, I’ve let go of my aging parents, my career and a lifetime of associates and colleagues, a dear friend, and this past year I watched my two kids leave home to start their own lives of growth and accumulation.

At its best, letting go brings an emotional release, a lightness, a feeling of immense relief, like putting down a heavy weight you’ve been carrying around for too long. At its worst, it brings a paralyzing sense of irretrievable loss. I’ve been thinking about these two very different outcomes as we navigate our next phase of letting go.

I’m told your house never looks as good as the day you sell, and after twenty-three years here on Vashon Island, we’re close to reaching that particular zenith. White paint has stained my fingers and forearm, and a big smear tattoos my right cheek. The list of projects has dwindled over the past weeks, and we’re down to just a few beauty marks.

After each section of trim I painted today, I found myself looking out at the water on this sunny Spring day. You’d think after all these years I’d take this view of Puget Sound for granted, but I don’t. For a spell, I watched a container ship make its way southbound to offload in Tacoma, its wake stretching out for miles in the flat water.

On clear days you can see Whidbey Island from our front porch. Such a wide, unencumbered expanse of water provides a theatrical experience for watching weather systems roll through, especially the northern gales in deep winter. Dark gray squalls march across the water, relentless in their intensity, unstoppable in their progress. Bald eagles float just fifty yards off the porch, contorting their wings in tiny increments to remain utterly still as they study the whipped up sea for a meal. The Firs and the big Japanese Maple tree groan and shudder in the gusts. The biting sting of the wind on your cheek makes you appreciate the warmth inside the house as you take all this in.

They say it takes a special kind of person to live on an island like Vashon. Betty MacDonald wrote her memoir Onions in the Stew while living here in the 1940s. Most of her humorous observations about the eccentricities and shortcomings of island life still ring true.

Anyone contemplating island dwelling must be physically strong and it is an added advantage if you aren’t too bright.

Vashon is nestled in southern Puget Sound halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. The island population of roughly ten thousand hasn’t budged much in thirty years. There are no bridges that connect us to the mainland. Ferries on the north and sound ends of the island are the gateways to visit or leave.

Unlike more tourist-minded destinations, Vashon grooves with its own unique personality. Some say that driving off the ferry boat and winding your way through its rural roads is like going back in time. “Keep Vashon Weird” bumper stickers adorn VW buses and BMWs alike. Eco-friendly farmers, artists, hippies, celebrities, weekenders, old families, newcomers, commuters, eccentrics, musicians, professionals … a hodgepodge brought together by a love of saltwater, an unconventional lifestyle, and geographic seclusion.

I’ve lived here far longer than any other place. I’ve put down deep roots. In 35 years of life before Vashon, I moved some twenty times, from one house or apartment to the next, every year or two, which at the time seemed perfectly normal. Growing up, my parents had this ache in them to roam. We moved every year in my four years of high school. I was a shy kid. By the time I made any friends, we were packing up for the next town.

Lisa, my partner these many years, also led a wandering life as a child. Instead of traipsing through small Washington coastal towns, she lived abroad, calling places like Singapore, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand her home. Her father worked in construction, and when the job ended, they moved on. Again and again.

From the early days of our relationship, we kindled a dream of running off together. A ranch in Montana, a seaside villa in Mexico, a flat in Madrid. Six months into our courtship, we spent three weeks touring Greece and decided, after perhaps a bit too much Ouzo, to get married there and then on the island of Skiathos. Neither of us had met the other’s parents, and our stunned friends were sure the marriage would not last out the year. But when you know, you know.

When our daughter was born, we vowed to give her something we never had: a consistent, unchanging childhood home. We moved to Vashon just shy of her first birthday, and she and her younger brother grew up in the same house, in the same little town, with the same friends from pre-school tots to angsty high school seniors. When the time for college rolled around, both were desperate to get away from a place so small and remote. Yet, later in life, I wonder if the deep-rooted memories of sandy beaches, quiet forests, and a one-block town without traffic lights become a subconscious yardstick for the ideal life?

The house, built in 1917, turned one hundred during our time here. At one point or another, we’ve remodeled just about every inch of her, but we always stayed true to her spirit. She’s an old soul, sitting atop this hill looking out over the water. I realize we’ve just been her caretakers for a time.

I left the island every morning by ferry for twenty years and suffered through my fair share of business travel. Returning home, breathing seemed easier, the sea air and open vista perhaps working together to inflate my lungs more completely than anywhere else. The sound of the gentle surf through the open skylight lulled me quickly to sleep when I fell into my own bed at last. This island home has always been my sanctuary.

Every so often, a grandchild of the former owners stops by to see the house. Fully grown now, they look around, starstruck. “I spent every summer here when I was little,” a lady in her mid-twenties tells me, close to tears. They will have brought their partner along as witness to a living piece of their childhood.

I learned to sail on Vashon, and the connection between boating and island life is inexorably linked. I’ve sailed along her forty-five miles of coastline countless times, and my family knows to spread my ashes in Quartermaster Harbor should the sudden need arise. For years, we kept a mooring buoy in the deep water in front the house. It became a summer tradition to sail the boat around from the marina for crabbing and sailing and floating picnics.

On clear nights, I would sometimes sneak down the long flight of beach stairs to sail alone under the stars. Lying back in the cockpit, steering with my leg over the tiller, trimming the sails in the darkness by the feel of wind on my cheek. Sailing at night feels so magical: the lift and fall of the gentle swell, the hiss of the waves against the hull, the green glow of phosphor trailing astern, and that dizzying feeling of falling and merging into the galaxy of stars splayed above you. I’ve never felt so utterly connected to the cosmos as on small boat under the stars on a summer night.

Selling the house and moving off island has been our plan for years, so why do I feel so pensive as our time here draws near? My glances around the house and the water are slower, more considered, like Ahab gazing at the sea before his final showdown with the white whale. I strain to hear the tolling of an iron bell, for it’s possible the end of this chapter of island life is followed by mere epilogue. A little voice inside me tells me to stop, to reconsider. The house looks so good; why not stay, the voice implores. I am sorely tempted.

But no. What haunts us late in life are the things we didn’t do. In letting go our island home and life, we step into a new life of two distinct halves: from May through October we’ll live and cruise aboard Indiscretion, our expedition trawler, with Shilshole Marina as our new home port. Near enough to see our friends on Vashon and the perfect launching off spot for exploring the Salish Sea during the best weather the Northwest offers. In October, we’ll drive south to our new home in a 55+ community 40 minutes west of Phoenix, AZ called Victory at Verrado. Six months of warm winter weather, desert hikes, Seattle Mariners spring training, and poorly played golf is just enough time to begin pining for the greens and blues of the beautiful Northwest. We’ll lock up the house in early May and make our way back to Indiscretion for another season.

Lately, I’ve been having this recurring dream of riding in a hot air balloon. The gondola is staked to the beach in front of our house with anchors that seem much too small for such a large craft. An offshore wind buffets the big balloon and I know those anchors can’t hold much longer. The two of us pile in the gondola, which, once aboard, looks weirdly like the pilothouse of a trawler. We release the mooring lines and float up and up into the sky. We clear the tree line and watch our house and the island grow small, insignificant. We keep rising, our view expanding in all directions. I point out the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast. We float over Desolation Sound, Princess Louisa Inlet, the Broughton Archipelago, and the wide expanse of Queen Charlotte Sound. Ahead, just over the curved horizon lies Alaska. The dream always ends when we toss out the sandbags of ballast at our feet. Maybe we simply fly upwards into the stars. Or, perhaps we set down in Greece to renew our marriage vows, but this time, we stay the whole summer, traveling light.

The post The Art of Letting Go appeared first on Robert Breen.