The Eggshell Landing: Love, Death and Forgiveness in Hawaii

By Christina Grof

"Christina Grof offers us a beautifully crafted and moving memoir of transformation
of family at the end of a life, of unconsciousness and abuse, understanding and
redemption."
--Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart
The Eggshell Landing takes us to the warm breezes and flower-lined lanais of Hawaii, where Christina Grof was raised by her mother and stepfather. There was much joy and adventure in her childhood, but also dark secrets and enduring pain. Now her abusive stepfather is dying of malignant melanoma in Honolulu. Should she confront him about her conflicted difficult memories? Should she stay silent? Maybe just write him a letter? Or should she go back to the islands, support him and help to create a loving atmosphere for his last months? What would you do? The Eggshell Landing is a miraculous story of forgiveness and redemption. The hard-shelled man who drank and acted inappropriately toward his daughter is not someone for whom we would envision redemption or compassion. Christina Grof's experiences with her dying stepfather will surprise you and perhaps even change your attitude toward forgiveness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbara Moulton
• Release date: May 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311281333

Christina Grof

Christina Grof is a teacher, artist, and author of The Thirst for Wholeness; she is the founder of the Spiritual Emergence Network, co-creator of Grof Transpersonal Training and Holotropic BreathworkTM and recipient of three honorary doctorates. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Stan.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Victor’s Final Sail, 1995

I need a head, Victor announced in a surprised tone as he stood up. Tina, you can help me.

Frank moored his yacht to the buoy several hundred yards from the pier; there he had untied the waiting dinghy – the sailboat’s small rowboat and shuttle to shore – and brought it alongside, looping its line over a cleat. I’ll secure the sails, he volunteered. You go ahead.

I preceded my stepfather down the short teak ladder leading into the yacht’s cabin and stood at the bottom, reaching up. My sister, Sandy, helped him turn around and find the first rung with his foot, as I put my hands around his bony hips to steady him. Sandy and Frank busied themselves fastening the sail covers into place and I helped Victor, weakened by metastasized melanoma, to navigate the ladder gingerly, tentatively, leaning all his weight into me.

I could let go and he would fall, I thought in an unwelcome instant. A sudden impulse to hurt him surged through my bloodstream like blind passion, tugging at me the way people with a fear of heights feel magnetized to impulsively, dizzily lurch from the top floor of a skyscraper.

Victor would fall and the fall would kill him. He is utterly dependent on me. He trusts me the way I trusted him and I could betray him as he had betrayed me. The roles are reversed. I could take my hands away and he could tumble, helpless and broken, to the deck like a crushed sparrow. All it would take is a split second. And no one would ever need to know what happened.

This is the moment – just an instant long – when crimes can be committed, when something irrational takes hold and snuffs out even the most finely honed morality. And afterwards, the neighbors say to reporters, But we don’t understand this terrible thing. She was such a fine upstanding member of the community. Always seemed happy; she was a loving wife to her husband and a great mother to their kids. Then shaking their heads with puzzlement and smoothing their hair, they would look into the television camera close-up and say, She must have simply snapped.

But my moment came and went. Repeating the mindless cruelty in which I had been schooled would be yet another submission, a confession that I had absorbed and digested the abuse of generations and, retooling it, had numbly perpetuated it. Unlike the DNA in my genes, this non-biologically inherited trait would stop with me. I stood there and fought to break the spell that bound me.

To a casual observer, I might have looked placid, but I was fierce and fraught within. Rather than complying with those who had gone before me, I stood firmly in the richly varnished cabin, and supported Victor as I guided him all the way down the ladder and led him to the tiny restroom or head, in nautical terms. I could never play the role he had played with me.

After six and a half decades of navigating the oceans, Victor had just sailed his last sail. In fair seas and stormy, Victor had stood at the wheel of his own thirty-five-foot yawl, Ehukai, and had guided his boat all through the Caribbean and the South Pacific. The boat’s name, Ehukai, summed up in one lyrical Hawaiian word the description for the fine mist blown back from a breaking wave by a strong wind. Ehukai was the love of my stepfather’s life, even during the years he was married to my mother.

When I was twelve and my sister Emma was seven, Sandy was born, and our family grew to five. Victor finally had a blood daughter, his other real love. Shortly afterward, as Mother’s breasts became laden with milk and he was repelled by her odor of sour spit-up and baby oil, he planned for master boat builders in Hong Kong to construct Ehukai II. The new boat was 50 feet long, crafted out of teak wood, and sleeker than he had ever dreamed. After long months, Ehukai II, a ketch (with the aft mast before the steering wheel rather than behind), was finished, and Victor flew to Hong Kong, had his new toy loaded carefully onto a freighter, and shipped her home to Honolulu.

That boat was his lover, his soul mate, and his willing mistress, who transported him to lands beyond his dreams and afforded him pleasures unmatched by any woman. Perhaps it is this union, both historic and mythic, between a sailor and his obedient vessel, that has prompted men for centuries to wishfully refer to their crafts, from the smallest rowboats to the greatest ocean liners, as the distinctly feminine she and her.

However, six months before, no longer able to maintain Ehukai II, Victor had said good-bye to her, tenderly placing her in the hands of another, for a fair price. Victor was dying, and his last sail began in Hanalei Bay.

Before tourists and Hollywood discovered it, the small town of Hanalei sat quietly on the north shore of Kauai, frequented mostly by locals. Victor always described Hanalei as the most beautiful spot in all of Polynesia, with its graceful mile-long beach, graduated turquoise waters, frequent drenching rain, and its out-of-the-way solitude. When I was a child, our family sailed there every August, anchoring alone in the sheltered bay. There, for three weeks annually, our family dynamics would be distilled into thirty-five or fifty feet of space above and below decks, with daily shore trips to replenish supplies and break the tension.

The water is glassy smooth during most of the year, but, especially along one stretch of sand, it can transform during rough winter storms as it shudders with large, cresting waves and pounding surf. Occasionally, lively schools of spinner dolphins played within the arms of land defining the sizeable inlet, and if you were lucky enough to be underwater, you could hear magical porpoise songs as they clicked and hummed to one another.

When I was growing up, Hanalei Valley stretched inland from the ocean, checkered with taro fields and rice paddies and occasionally dotted with farmers’ wooden homes. The deep valley culminated in steep, dramatic mountains, green and lush from the rain and ribboned with waterfalls that fed the narrow Hanalei River that wandered all the way to the sea. Living on the Ehukai, our family easily depleted provisions from our larder, so every few days, some of us would climb into our dingy and, powered by a three mph outboard motor, would putter part-way up the river to the modest Ching Ma Leong store: Charming and Eddie Ching, proprietors.

There, we tied the little boat to a strong stem of the bamboo grove, and scrambled up the riverbank to shop for cans of essentials and fresh produce – sometimes mainland peaches or apricots, cold fruity popsicles, and chocolates for later. Victor colluded with Charming to make and store, in discarded boxes, large hunks of ice for the Ehukai’s refrigerator, literally an old-fashioned icebox. Both she and her husband lived up to her name: they were always gracious, attentive to us kids, and always eager to order what we needed or to pick it up during a town trip to Lihue, Kauai’s capitol and home to the only stoplight on the island.

From childhood, I remember the ingenuity of the rice farmers who sat in handmade roofed towers, like lifeguard stands, in the middle of their fields. Radiating from their little raised fortresses to the edges of their plots, they had strung intricate networks of heavy cords, dangling with shiny silver can-tops, foil, metal scraps: whatever had been lying around. Hour after hour, the rice guards would sit on their elevated stands and watch for birds, suddenly coming to life and pulling on the handfuls of colorful cords if a flock threatened their precious crops.

One farmer, apparently tiring of tedious days at attention for avian marauders, used his originality to install a record player and loud speakers in his tower. Thereafter, much to the dismay of both neighbors and birds, he blasted Spike Jones’ comedic long-playing records, known for the whistles, bells, gargling, broken glass, and gunshots incorporated into the pop songs of the forties and fifties.

These days, Frank Hancock moored his thirty-six-foot yawl in the middle of Hanalei Bay where it waited until his days off. He looked older than his sixty-six years, his face deeply lined and leathery from decades in the tropical sun and on the sea. His shirtless body was well muscled, but his belly bowed forward over his shorts and aging skin draped slightly from the back of his ribcage toward his waist. Transparent blue eyes were Frank ’s best feature, gleaming with intrigue and enthusiasm as he spun yarns about his adventures as a fisherman, lifeguard instructor, scuba diver, and charter boat captain. Like my stepfather, Victor, he had followed the siren songs of the South Pacific and knew its seascape well.

Sandy stood at the bow of the boat, holding the line tied to Frank’s mooring buoy. At forty one, Sandy looked good: ruddy and lean in her khaki shorts and turquoise tee shirt tucked in at her trim waist, arm and leg muscles testifying to her life as a naturalist and outdoors woman, shoulder-length sun-kissed hair loose and glossy.

That late August day, my other sister Emma and Victor’s second wife, Gloria, had declined to come on the sail, having been conditioned to detest Victor’s barking orders, his disdainful impatience, and rage-filled tension.

Somebody grab that line! The halyard – it’s loose, grab it, GRAB IT! Now pull it in. PULL IT IN! No, no, not that way! Haven’t I told you a thousand times? he’d yell, his face flushed and veiny. Goddamn it, I’ll just do it myself. The rest of us would sit and hold our breaths and ruminate about the day when he would be the blunderer; if he were the one to foul up, he might curse himself under his breath and look around to make sure no one was watching. When he made the inevitable mistake, perhaps our stomachs would soften and we would feel mildly vindicated. Until the next time a halyard came loose.

Hey, Capt’n Victor. You ready to cast off? Frank sat astern in the wide, oval cockpit, holding the tiller. Through the trade winds, he called over to Victor, who was securely seated on orange waterproof cushions and propped against the cockpit edge.

His faded blue long-sleeved shirt was covered with white sailboat designs like tiny architect’s plans. A bright yellow slicker sagged over his frame, now skeletal from the ravages of cancer, keeping him warm and protecting him against any turn in the weather. Toothpick legs jutted from his navy blue Bermuda shorts, bent at the knees, and ended with angular elderly feet and toes.

Shit, I forgot my shoes, Victor cussed, as he looked at his bare feet, white and naked on the floor of the cockpit. Shit.

Sandy and I shot ironic glances at each other. We both knew that one of Victor’s cardinal rules during our years of sailing was Always Wear Shoes upon serious threat of fierce censure. Except for Sandy. She was exempt. She was his real daughter and she lived by different rules.

Oh my God, you’re barefoot. Again! he’d roar at us. Where’d you leave your shoes? Didn’t you remember I told you to always wear shoes on the boat? No exceptions! A guy I knew was barefoot, racing in the Pearl Harbor race. He ran to catch a loose line and snagged his toe on a cleat. Ripped his toenail clean off and gouged the top of his foot. He needed twelve stitches. Blood was everywhere.

We had heard the same story each time someone forgot the uncool navy blue tennis shoes Victor and Mother made us wear. Same story, same race, same yacht, same man, same cleat, same blood. The number of stitches changed, depending on the intensity of Victor’s anger. But the rest of the story was always identical.

With the memory of his fury, I could feel my insides contract with fear, with shame – a knee jerk reaction conditioned into my cells as though I was one of Pavlov’s dogs. But this time, pervading the emotions of this memory, was the poignancy of this present moment. Victor was too depleted for rage; he sat across from me meekly, silently looking at his feet, a man whose life was sifting through his fingers, whose inner fire was now embers, whose body was fading. Even the desperate, sometimes violent efforts to control, to dominate the situations and people in his life, were diminishing. Victor had forgotten his shoes. How could I not feel the pathos and irony, perhaps a wave of compassion, for his situation?

Victor, Capt’n, are you set? Frank asked once more.

Aye-aye, Frank. Cast off, Victor spoke quietly. With Victor’s meek order, Sandy flung the rope into the water, walked back on the deck toward the rest of us, and slid down next to Frank.

The motor died on me a couple of weeks ago, he said, so we’re just going to have to sail ‘er out of the bay. Okay by you, Capt’n?

Victor nodded. He sat ashen and gaunt across the cockpit from me, haunted eyes staring out of dark sockets, a mesmerized slight smile barely lighting his face like a tentative child sitting astride a mechanical horse outside the local supermarket. Sandy moved to sit at the wheel as Frank raised the mainsail and the jib, which immediately billowed full as they caught the crisp trade winds.

As we embarked toward the mouth of the bay, Victor lifted his face toward the slight whirring of the sails and squinted, the corners of his eyes crinkling with happiness. Here he was in his element, here he was most at home. No one, not his women, and certainly not his children, could ever hope to compete. We were excluded from his private communion with the sea, but during brief moments like this, we were able to peek through a darkened window into the glowing soul of a sailor.

There is something peaceful about sailing with no motor, hearing only the wind, the sails, the lapping of the bow waves as the boat’s prow slices through the water. Nothing human-made or petroleum-powered, simply the boat, the elements, and us. We passed into deeper ocean and the transparent aqua shallows became fathomless peacock, then a rolling sapphire so rich you want to fall into it. The distant horizon loomed almost black, interrupted here and there by puffs of rain-bearing clouds. Misty showers curtained the mountains above nearby valleys, playing with the light until it split into streams of gold, becoming Cecil B. de Mille biblical.

You want to take over, Capt’n? Frank asked. Victor smiled his emaciated smile and reached toward the tiller. He steered for the rest of the sail.

It’s been a while, he sighed into the wind.

It must be as natural as brushing your teeth, I volunteered.

He smiled and nodded as he watched the increasing sea swells. Even more so, he said, gripping the tiller with a claw-like hand as we left the protection of the bay and, suddenly exposed, surged faster before a blast of wind.

The gust seemed to infuse Victor with transient energy as a wholehearted grin spread across his face. Victor steered and grinned, grinned and steered, but soon, you could see that it was an effort for him – certainly the steering, maybe even the smiling. Every so often, he would purse his lips and let out a prolonged, whistling sigh. When we came about, heading into the wind until the sails flapped, crossed to the boat’s other side, and filled again with wind, he had to be helped – pulled – from his seat at the tiller to one side of the cockpit.

He reached out toward me like children do when they want to be picked up and I held his forearms, feeling his weakness and his neediness beneath my grip. He would hold his breath, lift himself shakily, and allow me to draw him gently, firmly, the five feet across the cockpit. Then he would settle on an orange waterproof cushion, reaffirm his grasp on the tiller, and gaze out toward the horizon.

He looked through weathered eyes, eyes that had witnessed the daily comings and goings of eighty-two years. Perhaps those eyes first focused on his mother’s face, in the golden light of the nursery, as she slid him into the arms of a nanny. And later, as he learned names for the shadows and light of each visual experience: people, animals, insignificant events and those fraught with emotions became identifiable, even memorable. Victor’s old eyes had witnessed the disappointments and achievements of childhood: Father and Mother fading, waving by the West Palm Beach train tracks when, at nine years old, he sped with his older brother toward his first year of boarding school in North Carolina, then to New England for college, then to the noble horror of World War II. He had seen the simplicity of steaming coffee, the blurred intimacy of sexual passion, foggy nights fueled by alcohol, the beauty of a Tahitian lagoon at sunset, the brutality exacted by others on him and by him on others.

He looked through the seasoned eyes of a true old salt, a man whose pain and wisdom had come from the hard lessons of his life. These were the eyes of a man who knows the sea better than any human and is leaving it soon. He did not seem sad; he seemed present – clear and quiet and alert to this moment, then the next, and the next. Sitting behind my sunglasses, tears welled up in me. This is his last sail, I thought. I knew it to be true. Sailing had been his lifeline to the mystery of the heavens and the enigmatic ocean depths. And this was his last sail.

The light from the Kilauea lighthouse blinked at us. We came about and tacked back toward the bay. Black manuiwa birds, with angular wings crooked like elbows, coasted along air currents above us, signaling rain in future days. Silver flying fish skimmed along the bow wake, gliding in the warm air for seconds, then slipping again beneath the surface. Nature was alive, shivering with beauty, and shamelessly courting our senses.

Victor sighed and said, Well, that was sure a wonderful opportunity, Frank. His voice had a tone of finality. Frank nodded. Thanks for making this possible.

He was winding down, getting tired. Making the trip across the cockpit was more and more of a strain.

How about another short jaunt out, Capt’n? Frank asked.

No. That's just about all I'm up to for the day. It’s not all that bad getting old, he chortled at Frank. It’s being old that's hard.

He was so frail, so unsure of his footing, in need of so much help. He was once Captain of His Ship, in control, nimble, spry, racing up and down the narrow ladder to and from the cabin, charging onto the deck shouting orders, chastising those who did not perform their duties correctly.

Victor steered us all the way to the buoy where the dinghy was. Sandy stood at the bow with the boat hook, ready to reach for the mooring line, straying strands of her fine hair flying about her face. Her tough effectiveness at times disguised the sweet tenderness of her heart, but her efforts toward her father and others whom she loved demonstrated the depth of her caring.

Hey, Dad. You’re perfect, she called, the wind carrying her words aft toward us. You made a perfect eggshell landing. Wow! Perfect! It was a nautical term, eggshell landing. Navigating your vessel a mere eggshell’s distance from the dock or buoy or mooring slip.

An eggshell landing... chuckled Victor to himself.

CHAPTER TWO

A Pound of Flesh

I first found out about Victor’s cancer when Sandy called me early one morning from her cabin on the island of Kauai in Hawaii.

It’s bad, she cried through the phone. They say he has six to ten months – at most – to live, Sandy sobbed, but Dad isn’t saying anything to anyone. He doesn’t want people prying. Besides, six to ten months sounds like a death sentence, for God’s sake. She paused and I could hear her blowing her nose.

I called because I need your support. My Daddy is going to die…soon.

My bare toes curled on the kitchen floor as a hot stream of grief and anger rose through my body.

You know that I’ll do whatever you need, I assured her, my eyes becoming unexpectedly liquid, and I meant it. My sister and I had recently discovered each other as adults, now that the age difference no longer mattered. Although our lives were very different, we respected each other’s individuality.

There’s one other thing. He doesn’t know that you know. She said just as my mind was asking, why has he told her and not me? Not that this occasion was any different than many times previously. Victor had been devoted to her since the day she was born, so it made sense that he had revealed his secret to her. I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to do.

It’s not your fault, I reassured her. As part of our adult relationship, my sister and I had vowed to be straightforward and honest with each other. We had rebelled against the unspoken secrets and intricate games upon which our childhood was built. Spurred by personal plights – she, by a failed marriage, and I, an eight-year battle with alcoholism – we had both sought help from therapists. We had concurrently arrived at the conclusion that we would no longer perpetuate the family convention of camouflage and duplicity.

This is a strange situation, I sighed. But Victor will die the way he wants to. Let’s just make sure that we are still up-front with each other.

Always, Sandy sniffed. I love you.

I love you, too.

I kept up to date on Victor’s condition long distance through letters and phone calls from Sandy. A naturalist by training, Sandy had already published two books, one on ferns and the other about trails, flora, and fauna on the Na Pali Coast on Kauai. She worked for a small kayak business on the north shore and lead camping trips for The Sierra Club and other outdoor-oriented outfits. She was devoted to the ecological health of the environment around her, hiking through the hills, forests, and valleys of the islands, often with other like-minded souls, to remove non-native plants, care for wildlife (especially Hawaiian ducks), and clear established trails. Wherever she is, her letters and conversations are filled with enthusiastic and moving descriptions of the beauty around her.

Even as the baby of the family, Sandy has always been known as the most solid, responsible of the three sisters. While Emma and I more easily submit to the sway of experiences and emotions, Sandy most likely stands firm, maintains perspective and pragmatism, and sees her way through challenging situations. I have often thought that her reputation as the practical sister is as much a curse as a blessing; sometimes, other people’s expectations leave too little room for Sandy’s tender heart and moments of everyday fragility.

As often happens with stepparents and stepchildren, Victor’s second wife, Gloria, regarded Sandy as a rival for his affections. Try as she might, Gloria couldn’t bring herself to accept his blood child. She was most always harsher on Sandy than on Emma and me, more critical, less tolerant, less outwardly affectionate. Since Sandy’s adolescence, Gloria had punished her simply for existing. At first, Sandy fought back. But in recent years, she had attempted to maintain a polite truce.

Victor took his death sentence as a personal challenge. A bodysurfing accident five years earlier had severely dislocated both of his shoulders, leaving his arms crippled, with little hope of regained usage. But with grim determination and devoted physical therapy, Victor had salvaged enough movement to perform most daily tasks: feed himself, brush his teeth, write letters on his computer, and even drive his car. He was approaching his cancer with the same resolute attitude, said Sandy.

Victor and Gloria were longtime members of a prayer group that practiced spiritual healing, among other things, and they were marshaling the forces of a select few from the group’s extensive membership to work with them and pray for his recovery. Victor was determined to lick this thing, in his words, with the help of God and his fellow faithful. If anyone could prove