The Ferrymans Daughter

The air exploded into my lungs as I was startled awake. A flood of disappointment as I realized my time on the ship would have to wait until sleep took me once again.

“Why did you have to go Dad?” I shouted out loud to the walls.

He had left my life only three months before, but it felt like an eternity. It felt like an impossible task to walk in the living world.

The dreamscape from which I had just emerged, immersive. The ship of souls I had located and boarded on my long swim through the foggy waters of the afterworld. This is where I wanted to be, on the ship with my Father.

He did not agree and was often terse with me.

“Isla, you are 23, you don’t belong here! Go Home!”

I started stowing away, on the shrouded lifeboats that dangled on the edges of the ship. The mists served as my cloak, as the mysterious ship would glide soundlessly across vast oceans, mooring from time to time, to disembark those whose destination had been reached. This ship, that upon his death, My father had become the Captain. Charged with the task of transporting the dead from the living world to the afterworld that was waiting for each soul's sojourn, where they would rest until their inevitable return.

“When will you return Dad?” Where will you be next?”

“Isla it is not for me to say, it is not for you to know.”

This is all he would say. I would stand on the deck and stomp my feet and insist that he tell me. Other souls would wander amorphously past, heading to one place or another, barely aware of either he or I.

~

The beeping of machines, and the bustling of starched cloth began to invade my senses. Burning discomfort in my throat as I gasped for another breath. There, a nurse with an intubation tube in her hand and concern in her eyes, asking me repeatedly

“Do you know your name?” “Your okay, your safe, do you know who you are?”

Waves of memory were flying through my mind like a black and white slide show, glass, and an impact, then blackness.

“My Dad!!, where’s my Dad!!”

I croaked, desperately hoping he was with me, here in the hospital, here in the living world once more.

“I’m sorry Isla, your father did not make it, it is a miracle that you have recovered you have been in a coma for a year.”

“That’s impossible”

I attempted to shout, only to cringe in agony at the burning pain only a physical body can know.

I knew it wasn’t impossible, what was impossible would be carrying on in this world without him…Where form and function held a busyness I could hardly bear.

I spent weeks longing to be back on that ship. No visitors had been able to coax me into acceptance, or engagement. My stubbornness was my obstacle, and my focus was the afterlife.

The misty murky sloshing of the vessel that transports us all to heaven, the promise of return and reconnection fostered my insistence, to lay there wishing that I too had died.

In my dreams I would always return to his ship, sometimes hiding in the lifeboats, sometimes furtively exploring the many anterooms of the ship. Once I found myself in a bustling galley, full of clinking glasses and muffled conversations. Tables full of those souls who were traveling to their destinations. I was fascinated. I was entranced. I was in the dining hall of the dead.

Suddenly, my arm was in the vice-like grip of my father.

“Isla, why are you here!! I told you this place is NOT for you, not now, and not for a long time. Yet you return, time and again.”

“I must tell you, do not eat on the ship of souls, once you consume from these tables you may not return to your current incarnation.”

“You must return, and when your time comes, I will not be on this vessel, except to visit you, my beloved, sister, daughter, mother, My forever ally and friend.”

I woke with a deep sense of peace, and acceptance. Of the wheels, and their workings, of the blessings and the challenges, the victories and failures. The deep gratitude for every golden moment I had experienced or ever will experience, in this cosmic ocean we call Life.

~

By: Sarah St. Erth

In Loving Memory of All we have collectively lost, Joyful celebration of all we have collectively Loved, and in Hopeful expectancy of our many expansive golden days to come.

October 3, 2021