When The Ocean Retreats by Mariana Serapicos

My dad was cremated in Birkenstocks. He wanted his toes to breathe. The sandals were brown, size nine, shaped after his stride. Many years later, I picked out a pair—to find my steps without him. 

I can still smell him on me. Manuel, Mané, dad. I remember him well, or at least I think I do. My memories and home videos look the same; I don’t know if the footage is from my head or from the tape. Records of our life were important to my parents because their own undocumented childhood lacked evidence of their existence. Writing our heights on the walls, keeping letters, hanging our little drawings around the house. We were modern cavemen leaving our marks in a twenty-story flat apartment in São Paulo. It felt important at the time. 

As a family, we adored having our picture taken; it was fun. It wasn’t just special dates, birthdays, and parties—my parents liked filming our day to day and, later on, so did I. When I was six, dad hesitantly handed me a camera the size of my face. I filmed my parents dancing; dad asked if he could kiss my mum and, with a giggle, I allowed it. “I want to film everything,” I said.  

He looked well then. I remember combing his full, oily hair, admiring the shades of white and grey. I enjoyed giving him a massage after a long day’s work; I am not sure I ever did a very good job at that, with my tiny hands, but he seemed to see the benefits of it.  Everything I did seemed to please him.

It was a big flat for a small family. We were upper-middle class then, later demoted to middle-class after we were left in debt. However, in the early nineties, my dad finally had the money to buy a big flat; he didn’t have the time to decorate it though, working forty-hour weeks and weekends. And since my mum would rather read The Iliad than Home Digest, our flat was mostly bare. 

We lived on the fifth floor, a strategic choice. “We can still walk up the stairs if there is a power cut, it’s not that high up,” my dad said. Practicality wasn’t very much like him, but when it came to us, he had come to think differently.  

It was our own private gallery, our playground, our stage. My brother and I would put on shows; I distinctly recall our own version of Hansel and Gretel in reversed roles. My dad had done his fair share of street theatre and painted his face with sticky make up. He’d gone out to celebrate Carnival, wearing feathers above his head. He was a moving party, taking people with him wherever he went. When I find myself on the dance floor, I think of him and the moves that found their way through my veins. 

He was curious about the world, the people living in it, about art and food. Once, he brought home microwave popcorn so we could try this new culinary invention, fresh from the supermarket shelves. We didn’t have a microwave at the time. The package just sat there, unpopped, as evidence of his enthusiasm for novelty. 

When I came around, the father-daughter relationship was completely new to him, and he was determined to excel at it.“He was crazy about you,” my mum said, “You were his princess, his world.” My mum tells me it was a different story with my brother Gui; he had a mental breakdown when she was pregnant with him. My dad never had the best relationship with his father, and he was terrified of failing his own son.  

He never got to meet the man Gui grew up to be. My dad was everything his own dad wasn’t to him, and if there is anything as too much love, he was guilty of it. Because, like the paltry food on his plate growing up, affection had been scarce. My dad was a storyteller and he made sure he’d narrate a better life for his children.  

 “Papai,” dad, was my first word—possibly as a result of my mum repeating it all the time: “dad will be home soon” and “here is daddy.” I don’t know what my brother’s first word was, but I hope it was “mum”—you know, to make things fair. But life is not fair, I learned at ten. João Manuel was many things: a son, a brother, a dad, a partner, a friend. He was sick. He had no idea then. 

It must have been 1998, not even fifty at the time, and one day, he fell flat on his face. He was jumping over a rope in the garage and his foot didn’t move; it stayed there, against his will. Rebel leg, his body was organising a coup against him. He thought “cancer” because dad always thought things were cancer. He got a cold, it could be cancer, sore throat, it must be cancer. His older brother had died of cancer, his father figure, his best friend. The man who registered him at school in Brazil when he was twelve years old, he owed his education, his life to him. He passed before I was born; I never met my uncle, the man who helped my dad become the man he always wanted to be. 

My dad’s leg started shaking and he couldn’t hold on, he was losing his grip on things—and on reality amongst them.  It was cancer—it had to be—because he knew cancer and you can’t predict what you don’t have a word for, what you haven’t heard of before. Once you have a name you have a meaning, the world around you makes sense. Even if the news is bad, you want to know what to expect. The unknown is too scary to bear.  

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. My parents hadn’t heard of it; most people hadn’t. What did it have to do with his leg? In a pre-internet world, it was a lonely fight. There were no forums or chat rooms then; we didn’t know anyone else who suffered from ALS, nobody was raising awareness for it, there was no ice bucket challenge. 

“He had what Stephen Hawking had,” I would later tell my friends. And now that Stephen Hawking is dead, I wonder if I’ll stop having a shortcut to describe what my dad had. Because I could see in people’s faces as soon as I mentioned the scientist’s name, that they knew what it meant to have ALS. At least they knew what it might look like; I could place a visual in their head just like that. I never meant to cause distress to anyone, but that mental picture helped them understand my state growing up. 

They were told he didn’t have much time, that it moves fast; he wanted to find a stop sign—he wasn’t ready for our life together to end. He started making plans. The lessons he wanted to teach us, the things we should do, the places he wanted us to see with him before it was too late, before he couldn’t follow us where we needed to be. The hourglass had been turned and I could see time trickling down; the grains were falling too fast. 

A year into the disease, he decided we were going on a holiday; he knew it would be the last. Growing up in Brazil, we were used to going to the beach on summer breaks. We’d make sandcastles, eat ice cream. I remember sitting on wet sand, picking up the heavy liquid with my hands and pilling the blobs like blocks. We’d make them close to the water, to get the perfect consistency for our project. As the day went on, the sea would get closer to us and the waves would take our work away, returning it to the ocean, its original place.  

The island my dad came from was made of rocks, the ones that you struggle to walk on.  In Brazil, he liked feeling the sand touch his feet, “natural physiotherapy,” he used to joke, instructing us to take off our flip flops and feel the ground beneath our feet. 

Me and my brother would go in the sea with my dad, as my mum watched us, waving back. She didn’t know how to swim, never has. She signed us up for swimming classes from an early age, “I won’t be able to rescue you, we’ll all drown if I jump in. You need to learn how to fend for yourselves.”

I remember when my dad taught me how to float, he put his hands under my back, and I looked up at the clouds, mesmerized, like something magical was happening inside. And before I realized, he had taken his hands away and I was floating on my own, looking at a changed sky. 

We went to Florianópolis in 1998 when I was 10—my brother and I had never been on a plane. I looked down as São Paulo became a blur and the people turned into ants; everything seemed so small; I wanted to be small like that.   

I had never been to the south. I inhaled the breeze; I didn’t know you could be cold at the beach. We moved, leaving our footprints in the sand; he held his arm without looking behind, not wanting to glance at the past.  

Having been born on an island, the beach felt like his natural habitat, the taste of salt that permeates everything. The beach felt like home to him, and he wanted to experience that with us, even if we were too young to understand the complexity of the experience. 

All that water in between was what united his two homes, us and him. Now he was preparing for a crossing—the final one. He always carried change in his pockets, maybe it was to pay Charon his fee.   

On that trip, we went to an “all you can eat shrimp” restaurant. My brother was addicted to those things—we had grown up on seafood. By that stage, my dad had already started struggling with the cutlery. He got his money’s worth and spent the night with a stomachache.

Was he thinking of his last meal, when he’d stop being able to eat solid food, being fed via a tube? He had grown up poor and ate mostly potatoes. Now he was memorizing textures and tastes, saying goodbye to them like old friends.

There is a picture of us with my dad on that trip, fighting the wind on the bottom of the dunes. You can see my dad’s hand at a weird angle, because he had already lost most of its movement by then. We seem to be having fun, trying to move forwards as the wind blows us in the other direction. We fought so hard, for so long. 

My dad is posing in a way—almost upright, but not quite. His left arm hangs limp, like an anchor at his side. He wears sunglasses, protecting him from the sand being blown into his face. His mouth is agape, shouting something at the camera—words flying like grains of sand in the air. He is aware of the frame, aware that this will be amongst the last pictures of him standing on his feet. He wanted it to be light and fun, like he was. He wanted that image to tell a story, and it does. It tells the story of a man who loved his family so much he crossed an ocean to be with them; not the family who raised him, the family he raised himself. 

We walked up the dunes afterwards, my mum, my brother and me; dad stayed behind, it was too steep. It was just the three of us and that’s how it would be for many years to come; we might as well get used to it. From the dunes, I could see him waving at us from down below and I wondered if, when this was all over, he’d be looking down on us.  

That day, my mum lost the car keys in the sand, and we had to wait around for a spare one. It was funny, no one was mad, we were just happy to be there—we didn’t want it to end. We’d get used to waiting in the long run, waiting for a cure, waiting for a treatment, waiting for an answer, waiting for death. We didn’t want the keys to arrive; we wanted to stay there; we wanted to keep him longer with us.  I left part of me on that patch of sand.  

We ran around; we ate ice cream; we touched the water with the tip of our toes. It was too cold for a swim. But we would jump the waves whenever they approached us, making a wish every time they came near, like we did on New Year’s Eve. I knew what I was wishing for every time my feet left the ground. 

I believed in everything at the time, in all the Gods and rituals one could think of. Not believing meant giving up. And that’s how I was brought up—we don’t give up on those we love. 

It was bittersweet when the keys arrived; we all wanted to go home, but home was slowing leaving us, like the ocean retreating. We saw the sky turn a shade of orange, then pink, fading into a light blue and then dark. Pitch black. We could see the stars like that, shining so bright. 

As a family, we had a habit of saying goodbye when leaving a place: goodbye, sea; goodbye, tree; goodbye, sand. My parents wanted us to acknowledge the experience, to cherish it.  My mum was always very good at letting us know when to say goodbye, so we wouldn’t regret not taking the time. Goodbye, Florianópolis, I said, waving goodbye; waving at him from inside. 

Not long after we came back, his appetite started to fade, and the ability to eat and the shape that comes with it. The slurring of the words, the slow pace. His routine started to move in slow motion as the disease progressed.  I looked at him on his chair, a skeleton of a man—how did we get there? He refused to spend the day in bed. He preferred the commute, from bed to chair. I think he thought it was too early for that, to spend the day lying down; he wasn’t dead yet.  

His olive skin started to gain a new shade of white, with sickly splashes of yellow. He’d look at the sun—he loved it so much. The sun had been a constant in his life; in Madeira, it was always there, warm on his face while he stepped on grapes to make wine. He hadn’t lost it when he moved to Brazil, where it is twenty-five degrees for most of the year. And now he looked at it outside and he couldn’t walk up to it. Most of his days had turned into that, just staring at the things around him, out of reach. 

When I touched his arm, a shiver went down my spine, the elasticity of the muscle gone; all that was left was flesh, fighting to hold on to his bones. I could see the ribs under his chest, sometimes even sticking out from under his shirt. Were they trying to flee? His body was not a hospitable environment anymore; his limbs must have felt foreign to him, an unrecognisable shape. Never had I witnessed body and mind detached like that; both parts were my dad, but I found them hard to reconcile. The man on the chair was not the man I had grown up with, but I knew he was there—perhaps locked inside his own mind. I was only 11 as he got sicker and sicker, but kids learn fast how to adapt. Eventually, I got used to his new shape and the sounds he would make; I would mimic them, trying to communicate. I’d open my mouth and say, “aaaaaa,” and we would laugh. 

I remember kissing his head and not recognising the man I had met, the man who raised me. I remember dancing on his feet, moving from left to right. It had been long since I had last stepped on them. Who was supposed to guide me now? 

He’d shrunk in those two years; the disease was overtaking him. And it was our job to remember how we used to be. His essence never left, and only now can I acknowledge that, because back then, it was easier to split him in two—before and after his illness. Perhaps it was more palatable to feel like I was losing him in installments; that I could say goodbye to each part as they left. Bye, legs; bye, feet; bye voice. Stalling for as much as I could, dragging my feet, like him. 

His white t-shirt was constantly covered in food whilst he could still eat it. I can’t even remember how often my mum had to change him; I know it was an arduous process. To be fair, everything had become some sort of enterprise, actions that we take for granted due to our functioning bodies had been outsourced to my mum, my grandma, and a nurse. They were in charge of his bladder and his stomach. When my parents got married, he’d promised to give my mum his heart; she took all his organs onboard. She would never have said “no,” to him.   

“Elvira,” I’d hear him say under his breath, calling for my mum. I don’t know when he stopped calling her by “Virinha,” her nickname. I don’t remember when he stopped calling her altogether; the movement in his eyes replacing those words. Can you imagine never again hearing your name being called in your soulmate’s voice? Silence echoing love. Because I think that’s what my parents were, each other’s soulmates. It has always been a choice; love had not been bestowed upon them. They woke up to next to each other every day and decided to stay. 

“Yes,” “No,” “water,” “move”—he blinked with his eyes. The doctors showed us a system, a cardboard paper with all the letters and key sentences; mum would patiently write it down, to make sense of his needs. He had studied journalism at university, but now his life was reduced to key words. That board full of letters with hidden sentences that he could hardly put together. His eyes did all the work, his body immobile, his mind at full speed.  

My mum told me once he was alive because of us, because he loved us so much. I cried because I wanted him dead, because I wanted the pain to stop, because I loved him back. Eleven years before, she had said, “Till death us do part,” and it did.  

One day, he stayed in bed; he didn’t want to go to his chair, whatever force of will he still had in him had left. We went to see him in hospital for the first time,even though he’d been there before, many times. My mum wanted to shelter us from that experience, from seeing our dad in a hospital bed, plugged to tubes, the smell of morphine everywhere. She had spared us the sight of that, but we were there now, for the first time, and the last. 

We sat near his bed and told him about our days; he wanted to know how it went. We talked about plain things because everything else was too big, because plainness is the fabric of life. “How was school?” he asked using his eyes.  

I can’t remember saying “I love you” when I left, but my mum told me later that I had. I hope that’s the case; if not, I also know he knew I loved him anyway. There is a type of love that doesn’t need to be said; I didn’t need a piece of cardboard for that.    

I remember my mum and my aunt taking us into the living room, knowing that the minute we sat down, it would be the end. “He is gone,” my mum said, and my aunt started crying beside her. My mum told us how much he loved us but that he couldn’t go on, and the stone that was bringing me down was lifted somehow. They gave us some space and we went into our separate rooms. I didn’t want to talk—I wanted to move. I found my swimming costume buried inside my wardrobe; the smell of chlorine ingrained in it. How do children grieve? They swim, I suppose—upstream. 

The pool had been our happy place, and I don’t remember visiting it much while he was ill. Perhaps I thought it’d be disrespectful towards him, to inhabit a past he could no longer access. Every day, as I walked past that swimming pool, I was reminded of what we once had.

There is a video of us, from when I was seven or eight; we are in the pool with my dad doing flips, swimming to him and back. He’d instruct us on how to float; he would offer his hand. He’d push us like that, convincing us to do what we were afraid of; making sure that we knew that we could do it on our own—that we wouldn’t drown without him there. 

My dad died on a Thursday. It was the 12^th of October—Children’s Day in Brazil—and kids all over the country would be receiving presents from their parents. Even at that age, we couldn’t ignore the irony of the event—what had been our “gift.” Childhood slowly drifting away. 

Holding a towel, I knocked on my brother’s door. He didn’t need much convincing; he too was lost. We had waited in that in-between place for so long that pain had become our identity; by the time we left it, we’d forgotten who we were.

The pool was empty, most kids were still in school, and we wouldn’t have to share that square. We moved around in calm and warm waters, unlike the ones we actually lived in. We had to keep swimming; that’s how we’d survive, the ones left behind, otherwise we’d drown.  

I dipped my toes—the water was warm—and I slowed myself down. I felt like a tea bag, my flavor dissolving, thoughts leaving my head so that the water could hold them. I did underwater handstands; I swan from one side to the next. I wanted to be physically tired—I wanted my body to match my head. I observed the wrinkles on my fingers: the passage of time. 

I let my body sink, holding my breath for as long as I could. I opened my eyes under water and saw the world underneath—blurry, green. With empty lungs, I came up for air. My eyes stung; it wasn’t the chlorine that made them red. 

Exhausted, I let go, allowing my back to reach the surface of the water. Floating felt like being on the cusp of something—like life and death. Not quite water, not quite air. The densities being almost a match. 

That day, swimming in the pool, I felt my dad’s hand leaving my back; I had to float by myself now. And I managed, somehow, because he taught me how. My mum looked down at us from the fifth floor, the one my dad had long lost the legs to climb to. She waved and we waved back—at her, at the sky above our heads.