The Horizon

                                                                        

 Gone From My Sight

by Henry Van Dyke

I am standing upon the seashore. 
A ship, at my side,

spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and starts

for the blue ocean.  
She is an object of beauty and strength.

I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck

of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says,
 "There, she is gone."

Gone where?

Gone from my sight.  
That is all.  
She is just as large in mast,

hull and spar as she was when she left my side.

And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me -- not in her.

And, just at the moment when someone says, "There, she is gone,"

there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices

ready to take up the glad shout, "Here she comes!"

____________________

Not long ago I reread Grief and Grieving.
 I had read it immediately after losing Abby and it gave me some insights into many of the things
I was feeling at that moment.
So a year later I reread it wondering if there
 would be any more answers I could find that would help me now. 

***

It felt like a new book to me.
It made me realize how very far I had come since I had read it last.
One of many new revelations to strike me was the notion of the horizon.

I am well acquainted with the horizon on the Ocean, living less than an hour away from the Atlantic.

Many times I have gazed off into it's horizon.

That never ending horizon.

**
Now, I have a special way to think of that horizon.
When a ship sails off and it goes past that horizon from what the eye can see,
it does not disappear off the face of the earth.
It only disappears from view.
So, I will keep that analogy for my beloved Abby.
 She is sailing across the Oceans on the next voyage of her life,
 while I must wait on shore until my ship arrives to join her.
She is not gone only removed from my limited vision.
She is still there just as she always was.

In this photo that I took at Vilano Beach in 2010
you can barely make out in the upper left hand
corner a shrimping boat.
From the shore it looks small but as it comes
closer to shore you can see
that it is not.
It's an optical illusion.
Just as the sky meeting the ocean.
An illusion.

The ocean does not end.
The sky does not end.
But what I can see does.
An illusion.

***
The next time I go down to the seashore
I will gaze out to where the water meets the edge of the sky
 and I will call Abby...Abby I'm waiting..I'm waiting for you to come back to me.

Abby I'm waiting.