SEA GLASS | Alexandra Godfrey
Broken, worn down, polished by the tide—the sea glass lies between my bare feet. I pick it up and let it rest on my palm. I love its quiet. I splash through the ocean. The water swirls around my knees, and a wave breaks ahead. My cheeks are wet. The rising sun is the only interruption.
In the distance, Margate’s white cliffs are beautiful and treacherous. A breeze blows, coating my lashes with tiny grains of silica. The sky is the flat color of forgetting. It’s been a long time.
My maternal grandmother, Joan, owned a small white beach bungalow nearby. I have dreamlike memories of sitting at her kitchen table drinking milk from a pink polka-dot tumbler. I remember my mother talking to her, slightly reprimanding.
My grandmother loved to stand on those cliffs, her white shift dress and silk scarf blowing, her body moving on the wind. She stood at the edge, beyond herself, not caring. Day-trippers on the beach far below stared wide-eyed, hands over their faces. Some yelled at her to step back, their voices indistinct on the breeze.
Perhaps they knew before I did that real life is wild and tragic.
She died over thirty years ago. This beach was her beach, but it’s taken me years to get here. Now, yesterday, I finally said goodbye.
***
My grandmother was born in 1912. Her birth was difficult. She became stuck in the birth canal and had to be pulled out with forceps. The forceps left her with star-shaped scars, and, according to her physicians, she became “a delicate girl with a tendency towards consumption.” Thus, she spent her early years living in a garden summerhouse by the sea. She came inside only on the most bitter winter nights.
She didn’t go to school. Instead, my great grandfather, George, brought her books from the library. She was prescribed fresh air and sea-bathing and given medicine from glass bottles of green and white and blue: Milk of Magnesia, Noxzema, Bromo-Seltzer. On her better days, she collected seashells and sea glass: goose barnacles, slipper limpets and periwinkles; drift glass frosted blue, green and amber. She kept her treasures for years so that she could give them to her children and then her grandchildren. She never did.
My grandmother never developed consumption. She did, however, develop severe mental illness, diagnosed as bipolar disorder with depression. By the time I was born in the 1970s, she’d spent years in and out of psychiatric care. These were old Victorian institutions where young women with unplanned pregnancies were mixed with women with drug addictions and older ones with dementia. She’d been treated with sleeping pills, painkillers, barbiturates and benzos. Then there’d been the ECT, narcotherapy and psychoanalysis.
My grandmother complained that the medications killed her imagination and intelligence. It’s hard to know when imagination becomes psychosis or psychosis a figment of the imagination.
Her medicine bottles often stood dusty and unopened on her nightstand and sometimes rolled under her bed. She preferred the beach and the end of the iron pier jutting out into the water. She would jump from the jetty, diving into the riptides. She would swim too far out. My father, a physician, said she was always too far out.
Eventually, I came into this world. I grew up to study medicine and learn about bipolar, depression and schizophrenia. I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and watched “A Beautiful Mind.” And I began to understand the shadows of mental illness. My patients spoke of them: the fears, the voices, the isolation. Their families talked to me about the worry, the concern, the exhaustion. As they spoke of their lives, their eyes watered, their tongues thickened, their knees weakened.
Sometimes I was there with them after the jump, the noose, the gunshot, the pill bottles; there with the sons, daughters, fathers, aunts, grandmothers, grandfathers and train drivers. They asked me about the signs they missed, the opportunities not taken, the point at which they could have saved them.
I couldn’t tell them what I know, what happened to me as a child back in 1979. I wouldn’t want to say the wrong thing. I worried that their guilt might infect them. So I said: “You could not have prevented this. This isn’t your fault.” I said it again and again. It became my mantra.
They nodded, but I sensed uncertainty. They tortured themselves with perhaps: if I had listened more? picked up that call? hadn’t given that ultimatum?
Sometimes when my patients were quiet, I studied them. I wondered how broken they felt inside. I wondered about their homes, their children, their grandchildren, their cliffs and oceans.
I wondered if they were close to death. Some had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Some were on the edge, beyond themselves, too far out. Some looked very much like my grandmother, Joan.
If they’d been my friends, I could have told them, but they weren’t my friends. So I listened to their stories, ordered the necessary blood tests, referred them to psychiatric services. I never told anyone.
***
I was seven years old when my grandmother came to stay with us in Yorkshire. It was a particularly rainy week.
“How about we take the bus into town?” my Granny asked.
I looked at my mother, who nodded.
My Granny’s eyes twinkled with excitement, their kelly-green only a few shades lighter than mine.
We left after lunch. My Granny wore her favorite blue raincoat, dragging her black polka-dot shopping trolley. We trudged up the hill, and I splashed through puddles, not caring about the water in my boots.
We stopped at the bus shelter, where sticky grey patches of gum covered the pavement. Someone had graffitied PEACE: thick white bubble letters outlined in blue. On the roof were designs with stars and checkerboards and crosshatches. I mentally spun the spiral of an S and dipped into a W, until the images became intrusive, threatening, psychedelic. I worried they’d hypnotize my mind, enslave and devour me.
A yellow double-decker bus loomed into view. I skipped out of the shelter, but my Granny grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Not that one.” She blinked deliberately.
I was confused. The bus went directly into town.
“You have to be careful,” she whispered, bending close to my ear. “There’s shadows on the buses who want to kill us.”
I stared in surprise, not sure what I was hearing. I wondered if Granny’s vision had gotten worse. She had a milky cataract in one eye.
I peered through the misty bus windows, wondering why I couldn’t see the shadows. A child’s face pressed against the glass.
My Granny noticed.
“They’ll see you first. They know your thoughts before you do. They see far inside your mind. They’ll take it all: you, your family, your mind, your smiles, your misery.”
I moved back quickly. I didn’t want the shadows to see me.
I pulled mints from my pocket and offered her one. She took it. This was a relief. This was normal. I wanted to distract her. I nursed my mint until it was a wafer.
I thought about jumping in a puddle. I wanted to make noise, get my socks wet, soak up the water fallen from the sky. I wanted to silence the chatter in my mind. But I couldn’t. I was so far into my thoughts that I became them. They began to capture reality: segmented and fragmented.
A thickness on my tongue became a numbing tingle throughout my body. My throat was salty. I tried to speak, but no words came out. My knees weakened, and I propped myself against the shelter. Dark storm clouds rolled over, and rain pelted the pavement. I wanted to go home. My mother sometimes had dark moods, but this was different. Her moods stemmed from tiredness and frustration. I longed to run home to my mum, curl up on her knee, feel her warm arms.
Another bus approached. My Granny gripped her coat and spun around.
“Not this one.”
I was tired and scared and numb. I asked my Granny how she knew which bus to catch.
She pointed at the bus schedule.
“I’ve cracked the code.” Her finger traced an invisible script.
Four buses went by. My Granny’s expression was twitchy, startled, dull; she seemed to be keeping a distant eye on something. I was captive in the tumult of her invisible world. I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. My socks were wet, my cagoule sticking to my skin, my home back there somewhere.
Finally, she found a bus safe to ride. The bus driver, a paunchy man with a kind face, greeted us. My Granny sat in the front seat, patting for me to sit beside her. She held her purse on her lap, using both hands.
Once we were settled, she opened her shopping trolley to show me a collection of knives. She touched one gently against my skin to reassure me. I felt the hard steel, then watched a bead of blood roll down my thumb.
“They will keep us safe,” she said.
I recall very little of what happened in town. I have no memories of going to shop after shop. I have no memories of stopping for tea and a scone, although I’m told we did, or of coming home on the bus, although we must have. The rain never stopped, my feet were cold, and I ran out of mints.
That was the first and last trip I ever took with my Granny.
For weeks afterward, I had nightmares of shadows, sinister silences, and secret scripts, which woke me, soaking wet. Nowhere felt safe. Nothing felt real. My grandmother had made me take a vow of silence. Telling anyone would kill both her and me. So I told no one. It was a dark secret.
I feel a need to say now that I never saw the shadows. Not when I was awake anyway. I don’t know why this detail matters. Yet it does.
That October before Halloween, my grandmother died.
“Granny died suddenly in her sleep,” my mother said. “It was quick.”
I remember that evening. I sat on our stairs, where I could see my parents talking in hushed tones by the fireplace. I cried. I looked out at a gust of wind blowing a can across the street. The clouds thickened; it was raining again. The leaves of an oak tree flickered under the weight of raindrops, shadows in the light and light in the shadows.
My Granny had called the night before. I’d picked up the phone but, terrified, hung up again. It was reflexive, like dropping a hot pan. My parents were out. She didn’t call back.
I tried to listen to what my parents were saying, but I couldn’t hear them. I sensed there was something more, but I didn’t ask. Then I felt the warmth of my mother’s arms around me, and I sobbed onto her chest.
“Sorry,” I whispered—just a pinch of air.
The shadows were now all mine. I felt terrible, incapable, guilty, holding those heavy truths within my child body. I felt deep shame. I carried the knowledge of the shadows alone, wondering if I were responsible for her death. I told my mother nothing.
Years later, in the early 1990s, long after the nightmares had stopped, I was searching through my father’s desk for graph paper when I came across a newspaper clipping of a woman who committed suicide: a woman who removed her hat and shoes, folded her raincoat, then bowed to the train driver before kneeling on the tracks; a woman who reportedly saw shadows on buses and trains and in the streets; a woman with my Granny’s name.
I put the clipping down in a panic. I felt as if someone were watching, as we do when we discover a long-hidden secret. I forced back tears—fragile in the fragility of my grandmother’s suicide.
I know my parents did their best to protect me. They cared. Back then suicide wasn’t talked about, especially around children. Suicide brings shame and questions. It causes others to wonder about their sanity, their responsibility, their guilt.
That night I talked to my Granny, and, although she didn’t reply, we tumbled together in my dreams until I woke in a hot tangle of sheets. Perhaps a smarter child would have found some way to talk about it. But I wasn’t that child.
We experience two types of violence in our lives: the violence done by others and the violence we do to ourselves. The latter hurts more, because it is of our own making.
***
I stand now in a pool of sunlight. The white cliffs rising behind me. The blue of the ocean merges with the blue of the sky. On a clear day you can see France. The water is up to my knees, yet I feel peaceful. I realize I no longer remember the shadows very well, only the enormous fear with which they once flooded me.
I bring my thoughts back to the water, the sea urchins, the sweetness of solitude. I swim in the stillness. My thoughts are the endless droplets of the ocean.
My Granny was cremated over thirty years ago. Her ashes were scattered from the shoreline of this beach. There’s no stone or plaque, just two words in a ledger: her name.
Soon the warm weather will end, and holiday season will be over. Soon the promenade shops will close and children stop coming here with their buckets and spades. I will return to my home in America, sit across from my patients and talk to them in eddies and breezes along cliff tops and beaches at sunrise and sunset. A part of my grandmother will live as fragments in me, in my children, in the sand, the ocean—tiny grains of silica as old as the universe.
My grandmother died on her own terms. Maybe she was tired of the shadows. Was it a relief? freedom finally, after living in a world of shadows that no one understood? Sea glass has its imperfect edges. We do too. The tide of time turns truth topside.
I breathe out and turn back, wading through the water. At the beach, the waves break and roll away, leaving a mosaic of sea shells at my feet. The cool sea swirls, and my toes sink into the sand. So many stories have led to this day. This piece of sea glass is here with me, now in my hand, in my life, in my writing.
I brush my fingers across the soft blue surface of the sea glass. I look into each tiny hole, wondering about elixirs and delicate children. Old glass, precious now.
My mother once said that, if we listen, ordinary things speak to us, reminding us of other things.
My grandmother collected seashells and sea glass: goose barnacles, slipper limpets and periwinkles; drift glass frosted blue, green and amber. She kept her treasures for years so that she could give them to her children and then her grandchildren.
Alexandra Godfrey is a graduate from Wayne State University where she received a Master’s degree in Physician Assistant Studies. She completed an emergency medicine fellowship and now works in two community emergency departments in western North Carolina. Previously, Godfrey worked as a PT in Britain, where she was born and raised. She has worked as an author and columnist for the Journal of the American Academy of Physician Assistants and the New England Journal of Medicine. Her writing has appeared in journals, including Confluence, Cell2Soul, The Healing Muse, Pulse, and The Examined Life. She was awarded the American College of Emergency Physicians’ writing award in 2017 and 2018.