My Father Became A Body of Water
View from my family’s cabin, Hood Point, Hood Canal.
My father is now a body of water.
We lost him unexpectedly a couple months ago. Many different emotions I’ve experienced during this time. First and foremost, it’s surreal. I still feel like I’m floating with the ground under me removed. I’m orbiting and existing in a different kind of reality than most people around – once again revisiting as I did as a kid on a more regular basis major life questions like – What is reality? What is the purpose of life? What are we doing here? What am I doing here? Where is my dad? - All while trying to continue my life pre new-normal as I navigate to my new new-normal.
I think these visceral life experiences – of which losing a loved one suddenly presents as one such possibility – causing a big life earthquake that makes one question everything. I welcome these times (although this has been particularly challenging), because even though they are rough these times serve as a means for the larger spirit within us to awaken to our internal fire and to kindle and tend to in order for us to brighten and warm the world.
I have long held the notion that spirits live on and I now have greater conviction that in the afterlife they are most accessible to us out in nature. In addition to honoring your loved ones at a cemetery or in a different physical location, I invite you all to find a part of nature that you feel your loved ones inhabit and take the opportunity to call on them from these places. The wonderful part of taking this approach is that your loved ones can be reachable to you wherever you go.
In addition to these reflections, I’ve come to some understandings from my father’s passing thus far that may be helpful to all of you experiencing loss:
Life is precious and our time on earth is a chance to experience all experiences, prompt new experiences and take the opportunities to grow and evolve as spirits. To me (and people have their different views) after we leave this earthly plane we continue living. We just exist in a different form and actually we return home to our true home, which is the afterlife. We go into what I believe to be an evolved form of incubation. We are assimilating all the learning we experienced in our recently departed physical life and integrating it with all the learning from our past lives to get an understanding for how we want to continue growing as eternal spirits for subsequent lives.
We are free spirits – alive and in the afterlife. The crazy learning to behold here is that we are actually free all the time, but conditioned on this physical plane to limits by false securities that keep us un-free or fears that take us away from our freedom. When we depart from Earth we are so much freer than we are in our physical form because we arrive home into the fullness of that which we always are, but forget or have a hard time accessing this awareness from our current form. We exist at a larger more abundant version of ourselves (partly because of aligning with all our past lives simultaneously) that is free from constraints of a body or time – something very difficult to understand from our human perspective. In our day-to-day lives in this physical form, we are able to access our freedom, because this is our natural state and it’s not really so far away as we may often think.
We are never in charge of where and when we go and the reality is that we will all go at some point. We have to find a deep acceptance when tragedies take place, as the death of other loved ones is part of the life experience that we all agreed to when we came here. There is certainly randomness for when our loved ones depart and how it will happen. None of us are excused from this learning and we must strive to comfort each other for all of us at one time or another will lose someone close.
Close spirits are all in their different ways our soul mates – all a part of a soul group. We support each other in growing – we give each other the wind beneath each other’s wings when needed or throw each other lifeboats to make it through choppy waters. We laugh together, ride bikes together and challenge each other. Essentially, we are here on this earth to experience it all and we get the chance with one another to be heroes, villains, mentors, assholes – all of it – in order to get the contrast to learn and evolve; find what we love and who we are and radiate from that frequency. We are not meant to be perfect, rather, we are intended to be ourselves and we are invited to live a full life in which we experience all that our souls desire to experience in this precious life. Ideally, we do more of the bright life endeavors – because it is love, radiance and beauty that signify our true nature and when we vibrate from these frequencies, we are the most powerful and most alive.
My father and I about a year prior out on Hood Canal near where his body was found.
In his own exit from this earth plane, my father – Douglas William Gant – went out silently into the sound leaving behind very large ripples. He was alone on his way to drop crab pots and something went wrong. We don’t really know what happened. It will always remain a mystery.
Someone so strong, so full of life, bigger than life and unstoppable – drowned.
It took me some time to come to terms that this is how it happened and to recognize that this would have actually been how he would have wanted to go. Doing something he loved and in a place he cherished; departing from his body in a fast and limited pain way. He was also so proud and someone whom didn’t want to slow down or be a burden on someone else and thus in many ways he was able to leave this world with his head up high and sailing off into the sound.
As Tom Petty sings in his Wildflowers song and how I believe my father asked me to have played by people he loved at his memorial:
“You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
Sail away, kill off the hours
You belong somewhere you feel free”
My fathers body being recovered. Kitsap County Sherriff’s Office
Thus when my father’s body was found floating in the middle of Hood Canal after he had passed hours prior, his body become a body of water for me. We never saw his body – none of us necessarily wanted to – that’s not how I want to remember my loved ones whom pass away if at all possible. I learned of his death an hour prior while driving south on I-5 trying to get out to Hood Canal as quickly as I could. When I arrived all the Coast Guard personnel and cops had departed. I was left with embracing my family from the deck of our beach place looking out over the water feeling a great sense of disbelief, a vast void of his presence and wonderment that so quickly someone so close could be gone.
View from the family cabin deck, Hood Point, Hood Canal.
It took some time to balance out from the shock and immense grief of losing a loved one so suddenly. I came to the realization after letting the waters within me settle, to accept that this was his time. I also found my grounding once again – as we all do in the wake of these great tidal waves crashing into our lives – to a place of peace recognizing that he is actually one with the water. That bodies of water will forever hold the greatest refuge where my father’s spirit will reside and roam. Whenever the time arises that I wish to call on his spirit, I know I have experienced his presence.
With the ebb and flow of the waves, he is present.
All in all, we forget that we are nature and we return to nature. Nature is so much more alive, shifting, dynamic than a gravesite or a manufactured building and as such, nature can serve as the most potent portal in which to communicate with our loved ones. From noticing the different elements at play in the environment, to the wildlife showing up, to the plants and their hellos – nature is an abundant telephone line connecting us to the other side. Although I can access my father’s spirit from wherever and whenever depending on my state of being, I feel most satisfied believing and experiencing that he will always remain a body of water.
Larger than life, fluid and powerful.
May you all take peace knowing that your loved ones live on and that they are here for and with you from wherever you are in nature despite them no longer living in this physical reality. This is a joyful, crazy, painful, amazing, colorful and scary ride we are on in this so-called earth plane. I wish for all of you – including myself on hard days – to find our fire from within and tend to it so that we can all more fully live an awake and meaningful life in this precious uncertain so-called physical life that is filled with much delight, sorrow, beauty and wonder.
Much love,
Marisa