I’m a broken clock, right twice a day, at sunrise and sunset.
The rest of the hours, I can’t always vouch for. This has been a hard season, and I won’t pretend otherwise on a blog whose whole purpose is telling the truth. At first light and last light, though, I am exactly where I’m supposed to be, keeping true time, and I have come to build my life around those two right moments like a house around load-bearing walls.
Summer is my season. I live with a mood disorder, and I’ve come to know its rhythm like I know the tides. Winter is my quiet, my hibernation. Summer is when I come alive, when I fall in love, when the world turns warm and possible. It’s not lost on me that this is happening now in the season I’m built to bloom in. Grief arrived in paradise, and the contrast gives me whiplash.
Summer is also the season I fell in love with him. The season we were happiest. Our family beat in rhythm with the sun and the water, took our best trips, had our best days, in the summer. Some of the most precious moments of my adult life were shared, in this season, with two people I may never speak to again.
Divorce isn’t supposed to feel good. I know that. It’s right, it’s just, it’s fitting, and it still floored me with a wave of grief I didn’t see coming. A thing can be the right thing and still knock you to the ground. I see that now.
Last summer, something happened, a year ago tomorrow. A consequence of another’s choice, one that cracked the bedrock our family was standing on. I won’t tell that story here. What I’ll say is that it was the beginning of the end, and that the ending, when it finally came in February, arrived without a proper goodbye. In the absence of closure or a conversation or a goodbye, there have been a hundred meetings with God at the water’s edge. I bow in grief and gratitude.
Yesterday at sunrise, a jogger who’d seen me before stopped on the pier. I was photographing a heron on the rocks. “So you come here every day?” she asked. I nodded. “Why?”
I said, “To stay alive.”
And right then, as if God had been listening, the sun crested the horizon and poured itself out across the water, and I didn’t have to explain another word. She understood exactly what I meant. “I’ll pray for you,” she said, and jogged on.
That’s the truest answer I have these days. I go to the water to stay alive. Not as a figure of speech, but as a practice. I wrote in my first book about the things that keep me tethered when the dark comes, and this is the newest and most faithful one: I start every single morning at the Yorktown pier, and I end nearly every day chasing the sunset somewhere across the peninsula because those are the two hours the broken clock is right, and if I string enough right moments together, I can make it through the wrong ones in between.
Fort Monroe was the first stretch of beach I connected with when I moved to Virginia twelve years ago. I’d journal out on the rocks you’re not supposed to sit on. It was my happy place, and I spent nearly every day there the summer before I met my husband.
Fort Monroe is where we had our first date. We had our first kiss on a set of stone stairs that have since slipped under the water. We spent hundreds of hours walking a shoreline hand in hand, teaching him to hunt for sea glass, filling a satchel with little worn jewels the tide had polished while I played songs on my ukulele. It’s where he taught me to fly a kite, where we celebrated our engagement with our stepdaughter, where we married with our dogs as groomsmen. Nearly every tender landmark of this whole chapter of my life is on that one stretch of Virginia shore.
I was back there walking with my best friend on Sunday, standing in the wreckage of that chapter, and I found myself saying something that surprised me. “Those were actually good memories, Mary Beth. They were real,” I told her. “And they do not stop existing because other memories came later.”
That’s a complicated admission, and I want to tread carefully because I recognize the seemingly impossible math. The instinct, when something ends badly, is to go back and burn the good parts down too, to decide it was all a lie so the loss hurts less. It wasn’t all a lie, however; there was real joy on that shore. There were years I would not trade. Pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty, and I’ve had enough of masks.
In essence, I’ve stopped trying to un-remember. The good was good. It’s allowed to have been good. Grief and gratitude can occupy the same square of sand.
I taught someone to love sea glass on that beach. I’ve heard he still goes, still walks that shore, still fills his pockets. I find I’m glad of it. That was a real gift I got to give, and it turns out gifts don’t come with a return policy when a marriage ends. I gave the gift of Fort Monroe. And in return, I was given a circadian rhythm tuned to the sun, a reason to rise before the light and stay out past it, season after season at Yorktown pier. We changed each other. Some of those changes were for the better, and I pray the good ones stay. I keep mine at the water’s edge every morning. I hope he keeps his.
This past Friday, I had the hardest kind of day. I was wrung out by the end of it. I had wept in response to an unexpected wave of grief that came up out of nowhere and knocked me flat. By evening, depression was telling me, in its flat and reasonable voice, to cancel my plans, that the whole practice of chasing the light was a cheap substitute for the life I’d lost, that everything I was doing was meaningless now that the people were gone, that my best days were behind me.
I had plans that evening to meet a friend and chase the sunset. He’d bring pizza; I’d bring two months’ worth of hard-won tips on shooting the light by hand. Despite my soul telling me to skip this one, the routine won. I went anyway.
I went because I have learned the hard way and written it down so I wouldn’t forget, that I will not stop making the right choices just because I can’t feel them. Showing up is not contingent on wanting to show up. I put on no makeup, carried my swollen eyes and my camera down to Jamestown Beach, and I stood in what God made.
The sky caught fire.
I showed my friend my favorite spots at low tide. And then, as if on cue, a great blue heron lifted up and flew straight through the burning light. “Did you catch it?” he asked.
“I did!” I squealed, and I felt the smile break across my face and take over my body, felt myself go warm, held and assured and still all at once, right there in the middle of a broken day. My friend looked at me and said, “Wow. It’s good to see you smile.”
Last night, our local news aired it. That exact fire in the sky, the one I almost stayed home from, the one I dragged my grief down to the water to witness anyway? It came back to me on the evening news like a note passed across a room. You made the right call. Look what you’d have missed. The best is not behind you.
That is what I mean about the broken clock. You do not have to be okay all day to be right twice a day. You are not depressed all the time, even when it feels like it. You’re in a depressed state of mind, which is a weather system, not a life sentence. And if you pay attention, and you’re lucky enough to have a friend along who’ll say it’s good to see you smile, you’ll find that even under the thickest clouds, God hands you a reason to warm, if only for a moment.
Ultimately, I’ve learned what to do at sunrise when the low settles in like fog on the horizon: I wait.
All this past week the forecast promised rain, clouds, nothing at all. And not once has it failed to hand me an actual moment with the sun. You have to wait for it. What happens at the water’s edge is rarely what was forecast. I can’t count the times it was raining when I pulled up to the pier, stopped as I lifted my camera, and started again the moment I drove away. Thirty seconds of gold through a seam in the gray is all it takes. That’s why I stay. That’s God’s goodness at dawn, and it has never once stood me up.
I have not been as alone this summer as a newly single woman might expect. I make friends everywhere I go. My world gets bigger with every stranger’s story.
Sunday night, I met a man at Secret Beach while waiting out a lightning storm that fizzled to nothing. He’s ten months sober. He told me how he lost a decade to drinking, did almost nothing but that, and how he’s reclaiming his life now one sunset at a time. He stocks shelves at a grocery store and comes to the river at last light to notice everything he missed. I was humbled by him. And I recognized him, too, because I’ve been becoming aware of everything I missed while I was busy inside my own four walls, serving family dinners, unaware there was a whole world on fire outside the window every evening at dusk.
Mary Beth has been with me in the daylight hours, the ones between my two right times. We’ve walked nearly every park in Hampton Roads this summer, thousands of steps and thousands of words, and somewhere in all that motion the ordinary gets regulated back into place. She helps me find the light in the middle of the day, in the broken hours, when the clock isn’t sure of itself.
And lately, strangers have started recognizing me. “Are you that girl?” they ask, the one from the sunrise posts, the one always down at the pier. Yes. I’m that girl. Half a dozen people this past week have told me, one way or another, that I seem to give off light, that I am full of joy. It genuinely stuns me because inside I’m carrying a grief I can hardly hold and will weep if you embrace me. I think it’s because they’re catching me at sunrise and sunset, seeing me in my two right hours.
A friend told me recently that everything on social media is a mask, that we’re all curating a self to show the world. I understand the point. I’ve thought about it, and I don’t think this is that. If a stranger stumbled onto my little corner of the internet knowing nothing else about me, they’d find a local author being noticed as a photographer, a woman with a deep reverence for this stretch of Virginia and a stubborn devotion to the light at the beginning and end of each day.
That’s not a mask. That’s how I’ve stayed alive.
And those of you who read this blog know the rest of it because transparency is the whole point of Writer’s Growth. I let you into the raw parts on purpose. Nobody wants to be the one to talk out loud about the grief of their own divorce, so let the memoirist go first. Let me be the one to say it so you know you’re not alone in it. If you’ve read this far, I suspect you might be exactly who I wrote this for.
I have a great deal to be grateful for, and I hold it in the same hands as the grief. I’ve published two books in the last five months. I have four signings coming up around Hampton Roads. I stepped into a new role at work I’d hoped for. And twice now in the past week, the light I chased ended up on the evening news. The blessings are real, and so is the loss. They don’t cancel each other out. They just live together now, which I’m learning is how God teaches some of His best lessons about peace.
So where have I landed, at least for tonight?
Yes, I’m broken. A divorce. The loss of a stepdaughter I don’t get to keep. No closure, no proper goodbye, a grief that still floors me without warning. No one wants to store in a box a plaque from their bedroom that reads: “And so together, they built the life they loved.” Divorce is supposed to hurt… with or without a mood disorder.
Nevertheless, twice a day, at sunrise and sunset, I’m right. I’m okay. I’m exactly where I’m meant to be, keeping true time, warm in the presence of a God who keeps showing up at the edge of the water whether or not I feel joy coming.
A broken clock is still right twice a day.
These days, that’s enough to live on.
Writer's Growth 