This is what Easter means to me

For one nervous moment, in the summer of my 13th year, the U.S. Coast Guard thought I was dead.

My 12-foot sloop had sailed off across the Hampton Roads harbor without me. Frank Henry and I stood on his pier barefooted and empty-handed and watched my little boat zigzag nonchalantly toward Norfolk before a gentle, offshore breeze. I was mortified.

“It did what?” Frank’s dad asked when we told him what happened. “It sailed away? By itself?” Dr. Henry was incredulous that I could actually lose a whole boat under full sail.

He immediately drove us in his Volkswagen Scirocco to Sunset Marina where they kept the family motorboat. The three of us jumped in and roared across the harbor in the direction of my long-gone sailboat.

We found it some five nautical miles away near the Middle Ground Lighthouse. The Coast Guard had already arrived, and their rescue was underway. They had secured my little boat against the hull of their much larger craft.

As we slowly pulled up to their vessel, Dr. Henry insisted I do all the talking. Yes, sir, that was my boat, I told the ruddy guardsman shouting down from the deck above our dwarfed outboard. No, sir, there was no other crew with me. Yes, sir, I forgot to wear a lifejacket. No, sir, I wouldn’t let it happen again.

Dr. Henry was a celebrated area surgeon. Frank and I were respectable enough teens. We all felt small as the guardsmen glowered down upon us.

The Coast Guard canceled their call for a dive crew from Norfolk. There was no need to conduct a search for my waterlogged body since I was present and accounted for.

The Coastie at the rail of his boat tossed me the bowline of my boat, and Dr. Henry, Frank, and I commenced towing her back home.

I was glad to have my errant boat back.

But I was embarrassed and shaken. For a boy who had never been on a date, I had caused quite the ruckus. An empty sailboat under full sail spells trouble. The Coast Guard was right to be alarmed. That harbor, which was my playground growing up, was dangerous.

My mind raced as we skimmed back home over the waves towards the Hampton flats. I imagined a helicopter churning slow low circles over the harbor looking for signs of my body, a young diver in a wetsuit ready to drop flippers-first into the foamy rotor wash.

Just as unexpectedly as my boat had loosed itself from a hastily cleated bowline and sailed off without me, so, too, death would eventually come and untether me from life as I knew it.

I’ll be standing on the sandy shore one minute, then swallowed by water the next. Life will slip my grasp. In a blink, I’ll be gone.

This was the most ominous existential crisis so far in my tender years. Even though I thought my demise was light-years away, on that summer after eighth grade and for the very first time, death felt like a solid, real thing. This was a chilly awakening on what started out to be just another lazy summer day.

The threads of this teenaged revelation, woven through many miles of adulthood, lead to the man I’ve become.

Death and other calamities await. Now as then, however, I’m buoyed by a handed-down, unremarkable faith: God’s hands are so big, nobody can fall out.

One day when I croak, some Coast Guard chaplain or emergency room doc will apologetically tell my gathered family I didn’t make it. Medical intervention failed. Summoning a dive crew from Norfolk won’t help.

Next of kin may be sad, but I’ll be whole in ways I cannot now fathom, secure in God’s capable hands, deep waters quelled beside greening shores of longleaf pine.