For as long as I can remember, I have gone down to the Gulf Coast of Texas in August. It was an easy drive, only about an hour, from Victoria where I was raised. Usually we went to Rockport; we would have a picnic on the beach, my grandmother would go crabbing off the pier, and often we would visit with my cousin and his family who lived in Ingleside. He was a shrimper and they lived right out over the water with his shrimp boat moored underneath the house on stilts. There was always a huge seafood meal when we visited (even though my Mother didn’t eat shrimp).

     Once I got into high school, we were down at “the Bay,” as we called it, to Rockport, Port Aransas, or Aransas Pass with friends whose families had “Bay houses” there. (Just FYI: the Gulf of Mexico itself is not a bay, but small bays have been created from it.) We water skied, fished, sunbathed on the beach or at the pool, and even went surfing down on Mustang Island, where there was actually something of an acceptable surf. We had to surf; this was the 1960s, after all.

     But then, “Gidget” grew up. She (I) went off to a land-locked college, got married after and moved to New York City. But she still came home every summer and always took her Mother down to “the Bay” every August. Eventually, we had a son and then, regardless of where we were living, our little family made a trip down to the Gulf in August which was, by then, a summer tradition. Sometimes we spent part of the vacation in Corpus Christi or on South Padre Island; regardless, it always included my Mother, and it was always in August before hurricane season threatened.

     And then, suddenly, my cousin, my husband and I were all retired in South Texas. Our son grew up and established a business in San Antonio, and my Mother grew old and frail. But she still looked forward to that day trip down to Rockport in August, even into her 90s. By then, our son had also made friends of his own with condos down at “the Bay.” So, however we arranged it, we were all still honoring the tradition of the Gulf Coast in August, until my Mother died in the fall of 2018.

     Earlier this summer, once our son had finished his regimen of standard treatment at M.D. Anderson and had been released to home care, we three were again planning, hoping, to go down to Rockport for a couple days in August. It was a place we loved, a place full of family history and memories for us (much like Cape Cod on Thanksgiving), and our son wanted to go one more time. But he didn’t make it; he died in July.

     This month, my husband and I decided to go ourselves and we just returned from a couple days down in Rockport. We desperately needed to get away from home where the demands of the last several weeks have been overwhelming and where the weeks to come don’t promise to be any less demanding. We stayed at the quaint Lighthouse Inn, went back to our favorite restaurants, visited our favorite shops, bought yet another couple Rockport t-shirts, and sat out on lawn chairs at sunset on the Gulf in the evening. It was bittersweet with memories of both my Mother and my son, and it was, in the end, not exactly the rest I was hoping for. Rather, I came away feeling this was a good-bye to the Gulf that I have always loved, because somehow, while the memories are there, the love and comfort I knew then is now gone.

     A profound loss leaves you suspended in time. Recently, I came across a no-nonsense book by a very wise woman who lives with the grief of having lost not one, but two grown sons. (Things In Nature Merely Grow by Yiuan Li, 2025) She talks about this state of suspension in this way: “There is no now and then, no now and later, only now and now and now and now.” As our time together began to shorten in the last couple months,  my son had begun to end all his messages written or spoken with “I love you now and forever.”  And thus “now and forever” became our mutual exchange.  

     And so that is exactly where I am — living in the now, here and forever I suppose.  Over the last three years I never did conquer the challenge of living one day at a time, but these days, living “in the now” is even more elusive. There is simply no then and no later without him; there is only this moment, from moment to moment.

     The Gulf between before and after threatens to be too wide to navigate.