There's a thing that happens on a boat at night when you're the only one awake on watch. Everyone else is asleep below. The water is inky black. It's just you and the wind, and a clear understanding settles into your chest: the ocean does not know your name. It doesn't care that you're tired, and it is not going to make an exception for you.
A lot of you know I lived aboard a sailboat for about six years. In this episode I tell you about the boat, not because you need to go buy one, but because those years on the water were quietly teaching me how to sit with people who are dying. I had no idea it was happening.
Boat life is mostly maintenance
When people hear that I lived on a boat, they picture something very Caribbean. Sunsets, sandy toes, a glass of wine, my hair doing something nice in the breeze. We did have some of that. I won't pretend we didn't. But mostly what the water taught me was that I was not in charge of very much at all, and it took me a long time to understand that this was not bad news.
Here's the part nobody tells you. Living aboard is mostly maintenance. Engine failures, things that broke, constant fixing and re-fixing. You're in the most beautiful, remote places, and they don't have the part you need. Two grown adults share a space roughly the size of a generous closet. River and I got very good at not being annoyed with each other in tight quarters, which might be a top marriage skill they should teach everyone.
You can't argue with the weather
When you're a sailor, the weather is underneath everything, all the time. You can check it, plan around it, and get better at reading what's coming, but you don't get a vote. The wind is going to do what the wind is going to do. The only real decision you have is what you do in response.
New sailors fight this. I fought this. You have somewhere you want to be and a day you wanted to leave, and a stubborn part of you wants to leave the dock anyway because you made a plan and you're capable. My sailing mentors hammered home the point: don't sail to a schedule, because the sea does not care about your plan, your capability, or your feelings about any of it. Experienced sailors wait for weather windows. When conditions open up, you go. When they don't, you stay tied to the dock, even though every part of you wants to be moving.
When the family wants to fight the weather
I think about this constantly when I'm sitting with a family, because a lot of the time the room wants to fight the weather. Someone is dying, and the people who love them want to push out anyway. More treatment, another opinion, one more thing to try. Don't give up.
I want to be careful here, because sometimes that's exactly right. Sometimes there really is a window, and you go, and you should. I'm not the one who tells a family to stop hoping. But sometimes the storm is just the storm. What I've watched over and over is how much suffering comes from a body and a family being dragged out into open water when what they needed was something else entirely.
Heaving to: the skill of letting go
When a storm is more than you can make headway against, there's something sailors do called heaving to. You stop trying to get anywhere. You set your sails against one another, turn your rudder against the wind, and let the boat find a strange, calm balance where she rides the waves instead of fighting them. You're still in the storm. You're not safe and you're not dry. But you've stopped pretending you can outrun it, and the boat takes care of you while it passes.
The first time someone explained heaving to, it sounded like quitting. It's the opposite. It's one of the most skilled things a sailor can do. It takes knowing your boat, and letting go of the helm at the exact moment every instinct is screaming at you to grip it tighter. It's often what keeps everyone alive.
I've come to believe a good death has a lot of heaving to in it. There's a point (and the body usually knows it before we do) where the work is no longer about making progress. It's about settling into a kind of balance and letting what is happening happen, with people around you who aren't white-knuckling the helm. So much of what I do as a doula is help the room get there, so they can stop fighting the weather long enough to be present for the person in front of them.
Control, grief, and the brochure version of death
Here's what I noticed on the water, and what I notice now in bedrooms and hospice rooms all over Northern California. The fight usually isn't about the boat. It's about us, and how unbearable it is to admit we're not in control. We grip the helm because letting go feels like failing. As if steering hard enough, or making enough deals with God, could change the wind. River tried this. I was seasick most of the time we were moving for six years, and he would concentrate really hard on changing the sea state. You can't change the wind.
I don't believe in sugarcoating, so I'll say this plainly. I can't tell you the ocean is a wise teacher and death is beautiful and it all makes lovely sense if you squint. The sea scared me half to death more than once. I've lost people I love, and it didn't feel like a lesson or a gift. It just hurt. If anyone promises you that death gets peaceful and easy once you adopt the right attitude, be suspicious, because that's the brochure. What I'm telling you is smaller and truer.
Control has a story. On the boat, mine was that if I was vigilant enough and worried hard enough, I could keep the sea from doing what the sea does. At the bedside it's the same story in different clothing: if I love hard enough, research enough, stay strong enough, never let them see me cry. What you actually have is your response. You don't get a vote on the weather. You only get to vote on who you are inside it.
Keeping watch at the bedside
That night watch I described, with the black water and nobody else awake? I used to think the lesson was how small I was against all that dark. I had it backwards. The lesson was that I was there, awake, hand on the helm, eyes open, present for whatever the night would bring. The ocean didn't care. But the people sleeping below were safe because somebody was keeping watch. My being there didn't change the weather one bit. It changed everything about how that night was survived.
That's the work, at sea and at the bedside. You're not there to change the weather. You aren't strong enough for that, and neither was I, and that was not the job. You're there to keep watch, to stay awake, and to be a steady presence in the small hours while the person you love makes the biggest passage there is. You keep your hand near them, not gripping, not steering. You let go of the helm, not because you've given up, but because you finally understand what your hands are for.
In this episode
- 00:00 Alone on night watch
- 00:49 Boat life reality check
- 01:56 Maintenance over magic
- 02:44 Weather rules everything
- 04:22 Dying and weather windows
- 05:20 Heaving to in storms
- 06:43 Letting go is a skill
- 08:56 Control stories and grief
- 11:11 Keeping watch at the bedside
- 12:35 Closing
Caring for someone near the end? You don't have to figure out the last days alone. Book a Guided Care Planning Call and we'll talk through what's ahead.
Feeling the pull to do this work? Pay attention to that. I teach it at Compass Doula Academy.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · 13 minutes
If there's anything else you're dying to ask, let me know: christy@christybraun.com
