A Picture of Him

We stood silent in the cold wind, snug in the wrapped warmth of our grandmothers thick coat, my sister and I, staring into the mystery of a freshly cut and polished marble headstone, the letters spelling my grandfathers name sounding out in our heads as if recited in a reading class at school. J - A - M - E -S, H - E - N - R - Y. Away at sea for most of the time, he died when we were too young to have him set firm in the then thickening slurry of our lives. He lived painted in the spoken words of my grandmother, animated in stories and short clips cut from his life. Soldier, sailor, adventurer, he was too large to fit an ordinary name walled within our childhood home or chiseled in stone. He lived on the wild outskirts of an imagined, unwritten world. Health ruined by the horrors of the first world war, he found relief from his pain in the swells and gale driven waves pummeling ships on the Tasmanian run. I still carry a picture of him printed in my mind, smoking a cigarette, standing on deck with the sun going down, alone, looking out into the sad distances of the southern ocean, lost in his thoughts, far away from home.