The ship is quiet this morning. Which makes sense, as it’s a port day morning and most of the guests are out exploring Dubrovnik. Going on with their vacation, heedless of the fact that all the crew members seem a little less sparkly this morning. Sometimes it feels like the passengers really are sheep – they do not see what they don’t want to see. And since we’ve been requested not to discuss any details, we can’t precisely enlighten them. Then again, I suppose it’s none of their business.
But still, you can’t help but want to flare up a bit, when a guest starts harassing you because they can’t figure out how to get their phone to work (er, ma’am unless you want to pay $8/minute your phone won’t work out here, or on shore, you’re in a foreign country!) you kind of want to jump up and down and say something along the lines of:
Don’t you get it?! Don’t you realize that someone is gone! Someone that you probably spoke to yesterday, possibly complained to yesterday is GONE and never coming back and in an hour I have to go to a bloody funeral and I’m sorry I don’t CARE that you can’t get your cell to connect!
But you don’t say that of course, because you don’t want to get yourself fired. You just kind of swallow it and go on with your day and when people ask you what happened, you mechanically rehearse the company line
I don’t know the details and I’m afraid I can’t discuss it.
Not for the first time I find myself shocked that the line does not employ a full or part time therapist or counselor on board. Some of my friends disagree with me on this, claiming that if you’re not strong enough to handle your own problems out here then you don’t belong out here in the first place, or that you should find reliance in your ship-board family. But what happens when it’s something too big to talk to your close friends about? What happens when you don’t fully trust the network out here, when it’s something you don’t want to disclose to a friend on the slim chance that it might find its way out of their confidences? And what about circumstances like this – when something unthinkable happens and you’re sort of at sea about how to deal with it?
But that’s – as always – not our call. Head office has its reasons for making the choices that it does, and I’m certainly not the one to criticize them. They will bring a care team on board so there will be someone – or a group of someone’s – for those affected to speak to.
For my part, I react to all this the way I always react to things like this. KBO as the English say: Keep Buggering On. I have my books, I have my friends, I have the scant knowledge that at least it wasn’t someone I was close to, at least I’m not the one having to deal with that level of grief. My reaction is that strange outside-the-glass-reaction where you react more to the circumstance than the details. I drop a piece of hematite into my right uniform pocket and a piece of turquoise into my left and I go on with my day. And not for the first time I wish that it was next week, but now it’s for rather different reasons than just wanting to see my brother.
But it still feels strange. One of the cabin stewards said this morning that it was like a dream, like it wasn’t real, and I think that’s the best way of putting it.
There was a service this morning, hastily put together but heartfelt, and attended by most of the crew. With his team sitting in the front rows of the showroom, where the family would normally sit if it were a shore-side service. Which makes sense, as they were his family out here.