One evening on television the black and white film On The Beach was telecast with Gregory Peck wooing Ava Gardner “down under” in a post-apocalyptic world while, in the background, tipsy Aussies, oblivious to the increasing radiation levels, were singing Waltzing Matilda. As the world was ending on screen, my mind was taking me to another beach, Bathtub Beach on Hutchinson Island.
When my daughters were little I often took them to Bathtub Beach in Stuart, a beach which has been hammered by hurricanes and erosion, but was once the favorite family sandbox in the area. A natural reef formed a “bathtub” and little children could wade into the water while parents sat on the shore, unconcerned that their little ones would drown in water that didn’t go over their heads at low tide. It was where Taylor met the ocean and fell in love with the sea. A half-mile off Bathtub Beach her ashes mixed with the current, so in a way Bathtub Beach was a beginning and an end. South of Bathtub Beach is the exclusive gated community of Sailfish Point, but even that beach is public up to the dune line.
Taylor and I walked onto Bathtub Beach one evening a few days before her eighteenth birthday for what would be our last walk together to the inlet at the end of Sailfish Point. It would be on such a walk that Courtney would meet her future husband Robby, and it was on such a walk with Courtney, Robby and Robby’s parents that I thought of my last walk with Taylor on the beach as Courtney and Robby’s little dog Camden scampered ahead in the sand.
During her cancer, Taylor often walked the beach for the serenity of it all. It was early January in 2001 and Taylor said it was the most beautiful day of the year thus far. We walked to the inlet and as she recorded in her diary:
The sun was shining brilliantly on the ocean, which was a thousand shades of blue and green. It was definitely one of God’s most spectacular creations.
But even with the beauty we still had to discuss the upcoming stem cell “harvest” at Duke.
“I’m not looking forward to that, Dad,” she said.
“I know, and you need another MRI.”
I always thought she took the claustrophobic conditions of the MRI extremely well, but then Taylor had learned to accept things I don’t think I could have ever accepted.
“You know, everything’s been good lately, Pops. I am confident that I will beat this. It only wins if you let it win.” It had become her mantra. I knew she was her own best cheerleader, and she said some things aloud to give herself confidence. But then, I do as well. I suspect a great many people do.
And then she spoke about Otis’s mom doing some type of holistic healing that dealt with energy flow in one’s body. She was optimistic that it was having some salutary effects. We weren’t quite as desperate as the actor Steve McQueen had been, going to Mexico to take some promised wonder drug. There is always a charlatan ready to sell a desperate patient a cure for cancer; there always has been I think, but there was no cost involved in the treatment and it certainly could do no harm and might help her psyche at the very least.
“It is soothing and I have a feeling that it will have positive effects.” Taylor said at the time.
I asked her about her friends. The last time she had been in the hospital the visits from her friends had dropped off and I made the mistake of saying something about it and it had made her cry, so I never mentioned it again. The novelty of a friend’s illness wears off quickly for teenagers, I realized, and they slowly lessened their visits over time but when Taylor was out of the hospital she plugged into her network of peers. But she had written about it in her diary.
I haven’t seen much of anyone lately. Everybody’s into their boyfriends. Hopefully I’ll hang out with them soon. Karly and Gia went to Orlando without me. I have a feeling they want to move in together, just the two of them. Life is so short and there is no use letting things like that get to you. You just got to let things go.
“I’m going to start doing meditation everyday at the beach, Dad,” she said as we walked along the shore. “I had the most terrible dream about Jeff last night. It seemed so real, and I woke up and was uneasy for a couple hours.”
She alluded to some type of a car crash, as I recall now, which, in retrospect may have been prescient, but who is to say? We then talked about her upcoming eighteenth birthday. She would be an adult in the eyes of the law.
“Looking back my life was very different and promises never to be the same,” she said philosophically. “Well, Dad, you always said ‘change is constant.’” Her smile was wistful.
A few weeks later the tumor would return and everything that was going well would go the other way, but that night on the beach we had a chance to walk and talk and I got a chance to see my daughter as a young woman and not as a little girl. It wasn’t as scary as I had feared, as I suppose every father fears, when his daughter completes the journey from childhood into womanhood.
The visit to Duke showed there was still a residue of tumor so Taylor wasn’t able to start the isolation and stem cell replacement which would have been end of the protocol. So, instead, the Duke doctors put her on a lighter form of chemo and told her to go off to college and live her life. Perhaps this should have been a harbinger, but we didn’t realize it.