Why I Refuse to Scuba Dive

on keeping my head above water

Sun setting over the Baa Atoll, Maldives.

Happy Halloween, friends! I have a confession: I’ve hated this holiday for as long as I can remember. So today, instead of going spooky, I’m leaning into the spiritual. This is a rewritten version of a deeply personal essay I published two years ago. It’s my whole heart on the page.

A scuba diver must be two things above all else: calm in the face of disaster and willing to be alone with her thoughts in the open ocean. On the day of my first diving trip—to Hurghada, on Egypt’s Red Sea coast—I was neither.

I had just spent months watching as a tumor ravaged my father’s brilliant, beautiful brain, and I had never felt more mortal, more fragile, more lost. My mother and I had nursed him as he stopped speaking and eating. We picked him up off the floor when he scoffed at his walker, we changed his soiled clothes, and we snarled at each other out of frustration and hunger and lack of sleep, always desperate for it to be over but terrified of the end.

I’d have done anything to forget what I’d seen and heard—like my father gasping for breath as mucus filled his mouth. It was a sound that reminded me of coffee percolating, and it meant it was time to feed him drops of blue morphine from a syringe once an hour, on the hour for as long as it took. I wanted to purge my mind of what came next, of how his eyes closed and his limbs stiffened and how his forehead was already cold when I kissed it, how strangers zipped him into a body bag and put him on a gurney so they could roll him out of my childhood home, how they stopped on the threshold to give their condolences and how I wanted to scream take that thing that is no longer my dad and get the bleeding fuck out of my house, and how once they were gone, I stood over his rumpled hospital bed, staring at the fallen hairs on his pillow and wondering if I should save them. They were all that was left.

How could I have been ready, just weeks after all that, to sink into the sea, where sunlight dissipates into limitless blue unknown? It was stupid of me. But my father had been fearless, and I wanted more than ever to remind myself I was my father’s daughter.

So I boarded the dive boat. It took us out to an easy, shallow reef in the warm waters of the Red Sea. I swallowed my dread and plunged 13 meters down, unhinging my jaw to keep my ear drums from popping, and I floated for a moment, weightless in the silence.

But then came a sound. There was a rasp from my oxygen tank each time I drew breath—a familiar noise, like percolating coffee.

I had to make it stop. I thought maybe my regulator was faulty, so I spat it out, grabbed my backup, and inhaled deeply, expecting a gust of stale, compressed oxygen. Sea water flooded my throat instead. I had forgotten to purge the backup regulator of water before breathing, and now I was drowning. So this is how you die, I thought. A rush of adrenaline hit my chest so hard it hurt, and the image of my father’s bloodless face filled my mind. My lungs got tighter and tighter. I flailed and thrashed and tried futilely to scream.

Then the dive guide turned and saw me. He stuck my main regulator back in my mouth, locked his eyes on mine, and gestured: breathe. My lungs unclenched, and my panting slowed. The dive guide made the OK sign with his hand, asking me if I was good. I took a deep breath. I signed OK back.

We swam on. I set my eyes on the reef, and tried to replace the image of the corpse that was my father—the man who had mowed the lawn with me in a baby carrier on his back, who revved his ’69 Mustang as we cruised the neighborhood and laughed when it set off car alarms, who looked at me like I was the most dazzling, perfect thing he had ever seen—with images of bright orange corals and iridescent fish. 

After the disaster in Hurghada, I was determined to try again. I thought if I could complete a dive without incident, my fears and my anguish might be carried away on the waves.

My chance at redemption came two months later, in the Maldives’ tranquil Baa Atoll. I’d traveled there with my husband ostensibly to snorkel with manta rays and whale sharks, but in truth, I wanted to put as many miles as possible between myself and the room where one of my favorite hearts stopped beating.

The resort was perfect for that. It was a glorified sandbar in the Laccadive Sea (which I had never even heard of before finding myself in its center), a place so remote that my iPhone geolocated it simply as “Indian Ocean.” I was precisely nowhere. For days I luxuriated in plush lounge chairs, sipped cucumber water, and ignored reality altogether.

Eventually my husband and I made our way to the dive center, a bungalow on stilts over bright turquoise water. I tried to hide my nervous fidgeting as we spoke to the staff—Martina, a petite Swiss woman, and Thiago, a lanky, ambiguous European—about depths, tides, and wind speeds. I felt compelled to let them know I’d been a hysterical mess in Hurghada so they’d understand what a liability I was, and that I needed to be watched closely; on the other hand, if I told them that the sound of my own breathing underwater made me see dead people, I would look mentally disturbed, and they might not let me dive.

I settled on telling them what had happened, but not why. “I swallowed a mouthful of saltwater, felt like I was drowning, and panicked. Rookie mistake,” I said, trying to sound breezy and nonchalant. “Our guide calmed me down and I finished the dive, though.”

Martina was sympathetic. “I find it’s always best to get back in the water after something like that.”

As soon as she said it, I realized I had wanted her to tell me I shouldn’t dive again. I looked at Thiago, hoping he’d save me. “You have to try, or you’ll never get over what happened in Hurghada,” he said. So I agreed to dive in three days’ time.

I was jumpy as my husband and I walked up the jetty to the dive boat’s berth. I told myself all would be well if I just stayed in the moment and focused on prepping my gear, but nothing felt right. I forgot to attach my oxygen tank to my vest, and one of the guides had to fix it; the neck on my wetsuit was so tight it strangled me; the lead slides on my weight belt bore into my hips. 

The guide was to give my husband and me a skills test in the shallows before we went to the dive site, so I pulled on my flippers and waded into the water. I pitched and yawed as I descended below the waves, finally managing to get my feet under me on the soft sea bed, where I stood in a circle with the dive guide and my husband.

Then I heard it: the gurgling sound. My own breath through the regulator. I fought the instinct to shoot to the surface.

The guide pointed at me. It was a signal to demonstrate that I could clear my mask—a basic safety skill—by letting water flow into it, then expelling the water with a sharp exhale through the nose.

I peeled my mask’s airtight seal from my forehead. Saltwater rushed in. It covered my eyes and nose and I held my breath, I forgetting I had a full oxygen tank. The rattling sound ceased, just like it had in the moment my father’s chest stopped moving. Then I was standing over him and the light was leaving his eyes and his jaw was slackening, and I was rubbing my palms raw on the bars of his hospital bed, wailing at this grotesque object that just seconds before had been someone I loved. 

I needed air. I kicked sharply at the sand and I shot upward, ripping off my mask as I gulped at the sky.

“I’m not going to go,” I announced flatly to my husband and the guide, who had followed me to the surface with puzzled looks. “You two should go without me.”

I fought through the waves to the wooden staircase that led back to the dive center. I tore off my flip flops and wet suit, wiped the saltwater from my chin, and sped back to our room, where I could watch baby sharks and skates glide through the lagoon from the safety of the deck.

The next morning, my husband and I lounged on an incandescent beach. I told him there was no help for it—that I would never, ever get over Hurghada. I would leave my memories in the depths where they belonged. I would stay above water, where I could breathe.

We’d been sitting there for what felt like hours, watching hermit crabs stamp leaf-like footprints in the sand, when out of the corner of my eye I saw movement on the horizon: flecks of metal rising and falling, propellers chopping the wind. A sea plane, ferrying vacationers to and from Malé. My dad loved sea planes. He loved fine sand and glittery water. To him, this place would have been perfect.

Suddenly he appeared next to me, full of electricity. He started telling me more than I ever cared to know about sea planes—about how their engines worked, how the twin floats achieved enough buoyancy to keep the fuselage above water, how the body of the aircraft minimized friction to aid takeoff—and he said he was finally going to get his pilot’s license so he could chase the summer around the earth. He sighed and said how decadent this was. How it couldn’t get any better than this. 

Then he went quiet. He closed his eyes, turned his face toward the sun, and drifted off to sleep forever.

I don’t hear death rattles when I think of him anymore. I hear propellers. And I think of sea planes, soaring into the blue.

Me and the sea planes.

reader, I’m curious…

What endings would you like to rewrite?

in case you missed it…

Last week, I published an interview Dana Leigh Lyons on her life in Chiang Mai. It’s full of warmth and wisdom and it’s free for all to read.

psst…paid subscribers get more good stuff

In the last couple weeks, paid subscribers got access to a thread where we chatted about preserving important moments versus staying fully present in them. They also received a personal letter with inspiration for coping with election anxiety and a lyrical meditation on a visit to a tiny town in Istria (plus photos pretty enough to make you say, “if this isn’t nice, what is?”).

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Back soon with an essay distilling what I’ve learned from three years of expat life, which will be available to all.

See you for our next adventure,
Sam