“Swimming,” by Joel Peckham, is one of the finest memoirs I’ve read in the more than twenty-five years I’ve been subscribing to The Sun. The rigor of Peckham’s writing — its economy, specificity, and restraint — allowed me to share in an experience that is, by nature, private and solitary. This paradox is, perhaps, Peckham’s real subject.
“Feeling less alone — in the pool, in my grief — should be a comfort,” he writes, “but it robs you of something. We are possessive even of our pain. We become it, and even the suggestion that it could be shared is frightening. We want to be alone with it, to caress it, saying, This is mine and mine only.
“But there are other people in the pool.”
I also enjoyed Sy Safransky’s Notebook in February. Apparently he and I were born within a month of each other in 1945, and I had a similar experience at my last doctor visit. I used to be six foot seven, and they told me I’d settled to six foot five and a half. Somehow that measly inch and a half cuts to the core of my identity.
I thank Safransky and Peckham and the scores of other writers in The Sun who remind me once a month that there are other people in the pool.
I was profoundly moved by Joel Peckham’s memoir “Swimming” [February 2013]. By sharing his terror of the water, he invites us into his phobia and helps us comprehend rather than judge it. His description of the accident that took the lives of his first wife and son Cyrus brought me to tears.
As a psychotherapist, I have sat with parents who have lost children, siblings who have lost brothers, wives who have lost husbands, daughters who have lost fathers. Peckham reminded me that we each live with the death of a family member in our own way. There is no normal, except perhaps that grief may change form as we swim through it.
Radha Richmond-Covey
Niantic, Connecticut
I just finished Joel Peckham’s “Swimming” and am trying to come up for air. I have two young children and am occasionally rendered immobile by the thought of them being ripped from me. And yet I still cruise along at seventy miles per hour with them in the car. I still let them recklessly ride their scooters down a steep hill and swim and surf and paddle boats and jump from the dock into that chilly, salty heaven. That Peckham so totally embraces what renders him immobile — swimming and living his life after tragedy — is a testament to the durability of the human spirit.
Catherine Spivey
Dartmouth, Massachusetts
