My brother and father drowned on a bright summer day. Swimming brings me closer to the two men I’ve lost | Indigo Perry

6 hours ago 1

Last week, I swam in the sea, slowly wading in until the water reached my hips, and then diving under the softly rippling waves. Clear jellyfish gleamed from the sand. Turning over to float on my back, I let my limbs and hair drift around me, and I thought about the spectral presence-absence of my father and brother, who drowned on a very hot summer’s day more than 30 years ago.

My memories of the time when they drowned veer up in summer, especially on certain hot days ending with thunderstorms. Anyone who’s spent a summer in Victoria knows the kind of day that marks the end of a heatwave. It starts off hot, everyone kicking off their bedcovers before it’s time to get up. The temperature hasn’t dropped below 30C all night and possibly all week. The sky is a hard blue at midday, and it seems nothing will break the heat, despite the weather bureau’s promises. Then the wind picks up. By late afternoon, the sky darkens as though night has come early. Wind whooshes through trees, fire sirens wail, and the thunder starts rolling. Soon the rain sets in, and we open our windows to let in the cool air as the temperature drops.

My father and brother drowned on that kind of day. The sky must still have been blue when they went into the water. By the time the news of their deaths reached me, the sky was morphing to a shade of violet tinged with black.

A day like that can still rattle me, yet it also thrills me. My father loved thunderstorms.

When I was growing up, my family lived in a small town in northern Victoria where summers were brutally hot and rain was a special event. The bitumen on the roads melted and clung to our sandals as we walked to the public swimming pool. I don’t recall learning to swim. It’s as though I was born knowing how. Our family holidays always involved water, my siblings swimming near me in some brown lake or river. Mum got in only occasionally, while Dad was often in among us, his skinny legs askew as he did handstands or leapt in to bomb us. We hardly ever swam in the sea. That was far away in distance and sensibility, a mindset that’s hard for me to recall now that I live in a bayside city, but back then we were inland people, and in 1993, two of us drowned in the muddy brown water of an irrigation channel. My father was 45 and my brother 25. I wasn’t there. I lived in the city by then.

You might expect that my enjoyment of swimming would have changed after the drownings, but it didn’t.

I went for a swim just over a week after the funeral. A beach holiday had been booked months earlier and I thought about cancelling, but no place felt comfortable or right anyway, so I went. I sat on a rock on the beach, my brother’s shirt buttoned up around me and decided to go in and see what being in water felt like now. I don’t know quite what I expected, but what I experienced was relief. I like how swimming clears my head and helps me to feel present in the moment. That day, for the first time since I’d received the news of the drownings, I felt close to the two men we’d lost. I heard their voices and saw their faces in my mind. My grief was new and raw, but feeling it was preferable to the distant numbness that had set itself into me since we’d buried them.

Until last week, I hadn’t swum for a while. My suburb’s not close to the bay, and life’s been busy. I could walk outside, catch a tram, and be at a beach within the hour, but it’s easier to flop under the air conditioner on a hot day or open the doors and hope for a breeze once the sun’s gone down.

As I floated in the sea, watching the jellyfish slide and roll with the waves, I reflected on the long-durational nature of my grief for this profound loss and how it shifts over time, varying in intensity and proximity. I’ve made some peace with its ever-presence.

The sea was calm. I swam out a little deeper, noticing once again that immersing myself in water, especially the cold saltwater of the sea, and letting my head become clear and my temperature slowly cool down brings me solace as summer returns, this time marking 32 years since I last saw my father and brother.