Birth, life, death. I have been birthed. I have birthed. I am alive. I have brushed up against death. It’s easy to do. The ocean, as seen by a little girl from Memphis, Tennessee, is overwhelming, more so than the Mississippi River. Her only guide mark, whose banks are visible from the shore, no matter how high the waters have grown. The ocean is more dangerous, more powerful, and completely inaccessible to her. She’s me. I wasn’t raised to swim. We weren’t the type of people who had a pool or wore bathing suits and mixed company. So, of course, I wasn’t raised with oceanic skills, the ones that help you navigate and understand water sources.

That became painfully obvious when I took a job one hour from the Atlantic in an inner harbor area called Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Elizabeth City sits on the Albemarle Sound, called, affectionately, the inner banks. The area is also in a swampland called the Dismal Swamp. My father loved saying I taught at the Dismal Swamp school. I’d soon learn what brackish water is. It is quite mysterious and strange. It requires animals and plants to constantly adapt to varying levels of salinity and water table height. Sharks could swim all the way into our inner banks. So you better believe I never swam in it. My healthy fear of sharks led to my respect of the sandy beaches and not to any new surfing lessons.

When my child Marco was a baby, my best friend and I took him to the beach one day, a normal Sunday church experience for us. We waded out to knee level. I nervously held my butterball of an infant in my arms as Belicia and I chatted and enjoyed the feel of the rocky sand in our toes. What folks don’t tell you is that the Outer Banks has a very short strand, so the waves have drug many a person into deeper waters with a powerful quickness that definitely needs respect.

I forgot that for just a few minutes that day, and as a wave pushed me down into the sand and pulled me back into open ocean, I had the lived experience of losing my baby into the ocean. This story has a movie of missed life experience between my hands, my child, and his end. Life is so short, but this was not to be the end. Belicia, somehow, with the quickness of a quarterback, intercepted my butterball of a baby and held him up as if she had won a prize.