Sarah Hampson
I write to you from the edge of the sea in Chester, Nova Scotia.
The last two weeks have not been easy, and I’m grateful for your understanding of my absence from these pages. I simply couldn’t write last week, and still now, words are unwilling to line up obediently into sentences.
Do as you’re told, I want to bark at them. We have a paragraph to write.
(They often don’t listen to me.
Be forewarned.)
A tragic death in our family happened two weeks ago. My nephew, age 37, died accidentally. It seems impossible.
It is impossible.
I saw him recently.
Won’t he just appear suddenly from behind the door and explain his absence?
We are close knit in the Hampson clan. There’s a lot of us, something that can be challenging to those who are introduced to it. (Ask Mark.) My brother, the one who lives in England, even refers to the family as The Firm, as the Royals do. We’re not an institution in that sense and certainly not Royal, but we’re like a little company, one that adheres to the same values, has certain mannerisms, certain traditions and habits.
We gather for special occasions such as my mother’s 90th birthday last September (pictured below). With our parents, my siblings (I’m one of five), in-laws and partners of the grown-up grandchildren (there are 15 first cousins) as well as three great-grandchildren, we number 45.
We need one loooong table for dinner together.
And now Chris is gone.
And so, after the focus on the memorial for him last weekend in Toronto – which was moving and sad with moments of humour - we’re all still grappling with his loss.
Memorials are supposed to give people closure. Humans like closure (and beginnings) to be marked by ceremony. Certainly, there’s comfort in numbers. The presence of family members, who flew in from all parts, helps soak up the grief somehow.
“The terrible necessity of other people,” was how author Lynn Darling once described empathetic support at a funeral. I came across that quote years ago and have never forgotten it.
In her essay, Darling was writing about the choice to marry – or not. She was extolling the virtues of singlehood if that’s what a woman chooses. Hence, the “terrible” part of her sentence. There are times when we desperately need others even though we’d like to think we can cope with all things by ourselves. Aren’t we raised to be independent and self-sufficient?
Not in grief.
Still, in the end, after everyone leaves, you’re left alone to contemplate what happened. That’s the hardest part, I think. When we returned to Chester earlier this week, I found myself looking out blankly to the middle distance, thinking about everything and nothing.
Stuck.
Incredulous.
Heartbroken.
And of course, in our house here, the middle distance involves the sea.
It’s right there, always, like the sky.
“In Sight Of Land” from Mark’s new CUAN Collection being exhibited in Toronto, May 2025.
The sea is not comforting. It is – she is - vast and mysterious; unknowable. A mistress who tantalizes. And maybe that’s part of our fascination. We want to know her but cannot – not fully. And maybe that’s why we are drawn to it. At least, for me, anyway.
Earlier this year, scientists found and filmed one of the greatest undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank – to global fascination and widespread media coverage. The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The ship was crushed by sea-ice and sank in 1915, forcing Shackleton and his men to make an astonishing escape on foot and in small boats.
They had endurance. Their ship did not.
The sea covered up her violence for a long time. She holds secrets under the skirts of her swishing gown. She sustains creatures we may never know.
Which is why Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s slim book, Gift From The Sea, is so lovely. She wrote the slim volume mostly for herself “to work out my own problems” she noted, while staying in a cottage in Captiva, Florida. Written in 1950, it was published in 1955, when she was 49.
Cover of a first edition “Gift From The Sea” by author and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
It quickly became a cult classic with its mediations on life, solitude, marriage and family – on the complexities of a woman’s life and the need to find a balance between all the responsibilities that come with marriage and motherhood. Each chapter is titled with the name of a seashell – and from an observation of the shell’s shape and purpose, she writes about what it signifies for her.
The sea, in all her mystery, was offering up a talisman for Lindbergh to divine the meaning of.
The sea offers answers, secrets – opportunities of reflection – if we take the time to find them.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh was the daughter of the US ambassador to Mexico. She had a dashing husband, Charles Lindbergh, an aviator famous for flying solo across the Atlantic. But for all its outward glamour, her life was difficult, coloured by traumas, both public and private.
In 1932, her infant son was kidnapped and murdered. In the introduction to one of her published volumes of diaries and letters, Lindbergh writes that her life can’t be understood without the kidnapping. Media madness descended during the search for and discovery of their child’s body, found 10 weeks after his disappearance.
“Everything is now telescoped into one moment—the moment when I realized the baby had been taken and I saw the baby dead, killed violently, in the first flash of horror,” she wrote of the moment she learned of her child’s fate.
Together Charles and Anne Lindbergh had five children. But the marriage was strained. He had a double life. In 1957, two years after Gift From the Sea was published, he began a years-long affair with Brigitte Hesshaimer, a German hatmaker. He had three children with her, insisting that she remain quiet about their relationship. Even the children only knew him as Mr. Carell Kent when he came to visit.
But that was not all. He had another secret long-term relationship with Hesshaimer’s sister, Marietta, and with his German translator and private secretary, Valeska. He had two more children with each woman.
I saw Anne Morrow Lindbergh at Smith College in 1978, four years into her widowhood. She was a graduate of the all-women’s college in Massachusetts. I was a student there at the time.
None of this information about the struggles of her marriage was public at that time. But did Anne Lindbergh know? I imagine she did – at least on some level. How could she not?
(In 2009 – eight years after her mother died at the age of 92 - Reeve Lindbergh, the youngest of Charles’ and Anne’s children wrote a memoir, Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age and Other Unexpected Adventures in which she wrote about her father’s puzzling double life.)
I remember watching Lindbergh, this tiny figure of a woman at the podium in a large auditorium at Smith, speaking about the possibilities that lay ahead for us all. She urged us to “have it all,” explaining that we wouldn’t be confined by the strictures she and her generation encountered. (Little did she know that the “have it all” dictum was next to impossible to achieve for many women – although it sounded great. We needed to revolutionize division of labour in marriage for starters.)
Tiny and resilient, she was. No hint of the pain she must have felt about her marriage; about that unfaithful husband. Perhaps she didn’t want to tarnish his image, even in death. Faithful to him until the end. She presented as an accomplished Smithie, someone we could admire and should want to emulate. The first woman to achieve a first-class glider pilot’s license; the first woman to be awarded the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard award for aviation and exploration; a celebrated diarist with the publication of Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead; and author of numerous non-fiction books. (She would go on to write two novels: Nobody’s Orphan in 1983 and Three Lives to Live in 1992) as well as a children’s picture book.
Looking back and knowing what she struggled with in private, Gift From The Sea and its thoughtful observations take on added poignancy.
Here are some short excerpts:
“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.”
“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach—waiting for a gift from the sea.”
“This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.”
“One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky.”
“Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.”
“I am very fond of the oyster shell. It is humble and awkward and ugly. It is slate-colored and unsymmetrical. Its form is not primarily beautiful but functional. I make fun of its knobbiness. Sometimes I resent its burdens and excrescences. But its tireless adaptability and tenacity draw my astonished admiration and sometimes even my tears. And it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness, like old garden gloves when have molded themselves perfectly to the shape of the hand. I do not like to put it down. I will not want to leave it.”
I have always thought of the sea as a meeting point of two realms – that on land and that in the sea. A beach is the threshold between the two. And somehow it feels to me that it’s a threshold between another two realms that are part of everyone’s life: the now and the hereafter.
There is much we cannot know. I have come to accept that.
From my perch by the sea in the Magic Kingdom of Nova Scotia, I wish you all a happy Canada Day weekend and hope that you have the chance to walk some beaches and look out to the wonder and vastness of the ocean.
We love you, Chris.
Sarah, my heart goes out to you and your entire astonishing family. Tragic.
I love Mark's In Sight of Land painting AND the Gift From the Sea excerpt - “When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships."
Sending a virtual hug!
Sarah and Mark, I'm so sorry to read this news. Sending love and light to you and all your family. L