Fiction: Dathan with a 'D'

Until Dathan, I never photographed the dead. I’m a surf photographer. 

I like to float in the ocean, and get caught up in the passions of some of our most waterworld-enraptured people. Surfers are great subjects because they let on so much of themselves in the waves. At their noblest, they’re earth-connected, down-home, and oh-so-game — too curious to miss out. Fearful, too. Many of the most committed surfers I know — big-wave or not — have chosen against children.

Take my favorite childless: a pair of brothers from the Bicol Region of the Philippines who spend weekday mornings catching waves together. They go either side-by-side or on the same board. A large surf can really diminish an onlooker’s confidence in who is who among Lito and Rey. Even in photos, when you can make out facial expressions.

Sometimes the bros will make a kind of ‘raise the roof’ motion, but with more pronounced lateral gesturing, and hand spinning. This is how you can tell they are fully connected. They are stringing together a thread, and ever drawing out the line. 

Dathan, growing up among these types, became a buoy boy in his own right. He achieved an awful lot in the way of bodysurfing. Lookswise not much there, just a bit of head in water, at ease in mass. He didn’t mind a big shorebreak, from what I could tell, wincing from shore. He’d emerge from white water with a look to say: I’m so here. 

I’m greedy for this image of my son, the hero bodysurfer, salted many times over. 

Moreso for the image of him sleeping after a session. These were his “pure cacao” sleeps, to denote something of how he perceived their depth. It’s the feeling anybody gets when put up against the sea: a little more worked over and opened up — richer blooded. It looked good on Dathan. He slept like a bleached-hair king every time. 

We knew we wanted a child. Ally was well along in her pregnancy when we started considering names. Dathan quickly emerged as a wildly handsome contender — the contender — and when we decided upon it we toasted with plums and tart little kumquats from our tree. We called our families and spoke his name over and over. 

(Ally picked the pronunciation: It’s a soft ‘a’ in Dathan — ‘Dath’ rhymes with ‘math.’)

Then, a bolt out of the blue, Dathan arrived. Ally and I saw our love for one another embodied in the most beautiful, blood-soaked baby ever. Our child would be their own person, however they wanted — that was the commitment we made to Dathan, and it was total. Ally and I set out to put on a strong example for Dathan by living up to the name of charity and mutual aid. We volunteered, and devoted more of our lawyer practices to pro bono. Our lives grew in dedication to the provisions of a young person’s life — mostly food, it seemed. Our goal: Encourage veg, and let be.

But not completely — we still needed to be good humored and goofy. 

Cool. Wild and willing to change. Lovebound. Ceaseless. Throed o’er in passion. 

We showed Dathan our love, and imparted that it was but one way of loving. 

And relief of reliefs, Dathan responded, and interested himself in us. 

It came to be a Thursday night ritual that I would brew us some hot tea and start recounting shoots of particularly meaningful or dangerous sessions. He latched on. I also had stories from my cross-country days — of Col d’ Kill Me, Horror’s Hill, Mount Fuck All. Collectively these hills represented around 1,000 feet of serious incline. 

But Dathan was more interested in the surf stories. Fine by me. 

I had certain stock phrases, to be deployed for maximum effect:

And that’s when all the water got sucked off the reef. 

Then I got beheaded. 

It was half past noon, wake up time. 

These killed with Dathan! That last one he especially liked to act out, reinterpret. Sometimes he’d “wake” by slapping around for a joint, and other times he’d yell after dream stampedes. In fact, he tended to rise early without much noise. Dathan usually spent mornings in bed with a book, something of the Robinson Crusoe like. 

I’ve published little of my work. I much prefer to get stoned with friends, set up a projector, and yell things out about whatever it was that captivated me that week. 

Ally and I would invite everybody to these sessions. When Dathan was pre-grom, there’d be no question of him being sent to his room for sleep. Too much “this fucking wave gave me a dental cleaning” and “that fucking wave dommed the rest of the set.” We couldn’t keep Dathan out for long. The draw was hydraulic-strength. For a while, he just made himself a shadow at the top of the staircase landing, and we’d more-or-less indulge that by pretending not to see him peering through the bannisters. But I didn’t intend on being a corelord to my own child, and so one day I called him down to show him photos I took of local windsurfers in Ireland — ink drops in proper mayhem.

So there we all were, plus uncs Lito and Rey, and Lito’s Pomeranian Charlie, and the wad of quickly-eaten bull kelp pickle stuck in Charlie’s teeth. Dathan plucked it out, and Charlie snapped, but Dathan reacted well, and we let off a round of applause. 

“Faster than a gun at pumping Jaws,” Lito said, eyes wide. 

“Your old man wishes he had that shutter speed,” Rey added. 

“Actually, got nicked,” Dathan said, sucking on some blood. 

One of the photos that impressed him the most was of a pair of parka-wearing onlookers pointing out to a stormy bay in County Galway. A pair of airborne surfers at their shoulders in the distance, out of their sightline. He found something that agreed with his humor in the positioning of the onlookers in relation to the surfers, who were so huge up, but apparently not enough to steal whatever had grabbed the parkas.

“The really big air one looks like they’re going to grind off this dude’s nose,” he said. 

Just like a SoCal kid to find multiple layers of shred in one pic. Dathan’s commentary got us all going, and soon we were taking him deep into the lore of his early days joining us on surf trips. Ally added essential observational details, like how Dathan was burned to the same pink as the Royal Hawaiian after a long afternoon swim at Waikīkī, and needed anti-histamines to relieve the itch. But nary an indication of pain. Just a low hiss, Ally said, imitating this ‘tssssss’ with a slow falling of tone to perfect silence.

Something to know about Dathan was that he was tough. Could take a lot. A nick phased him nil. It would have had to be illness, the treason of a body undoing itself.

Of this trauma I cannot now speak. There may never come a time.

Suffice to say Ally and I felt a deep need to be surrounded by people, all of us shitting with grief. And that’s what we got: a million arms gathering around, babka deliveries, reconciliations with old friends. It had the vibe of a collective beatification of Dathan. 

The Coast & Road hosted the wake, and it went through the night. Blankets and coffee were brought out to accompany the speeches that followed a long service of seafood salads, sandwiches, and raw bar. In the din of that oyster joint, oaths were made to never forget Dathan. We covered his preferred wet brine (sugar and salt), athlete (Ohtani), whimsy (Calder mobile), movie (Point Break — the 1991 original), and late-night host (Leno for a long time, but improving just before his death to O’Brien). 

I thought then — as I so often still do — of the picture of Dathan stored in my phone. It was evidence of something good — my son’s life. I hadn’t planned on taking a photo. What I can only describe as a protective instinct took over — a refusal to let memory dictate the terms of our final moments. They were moments of profound peace and love. Ally put it beautifully: “Dathan was pretty cool to allow us to watch him die.”

The question of whether to share this record was more complicated, but Ally and I talked it over, and we aligned on the possibilities of an even-greater public mourning. I spent a few days working on a suitable caption, and ended up writing: To Dathan, everything of the Earth, forever. Continuity for a kid who already took it all in. Now, sometimes, the sea can satisfy my need to see my son. That’s just one blessing I was trying to convey in my remembrance, along with the photograph of Dathan. 

Ally and I were probably always going to be easy targets — attorneys who make no secret of our work helping to secure U visas for victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking — but the hate really was that swift, and chaotic, and mind-altering. 

Up there with the rape threats, one of the worst parts of this process has been the purposeful and hate-filled renaming of our son to “Nathan.” The idea was that Ally and I were exercising in some liberal pretension by naming our son a name we love and find beautiful. Empathy, charity, meeting people halfway, taking life with a sense of curiosity. Nope. Only: “I pray Nathan gets impaled” and “I have evidence that you killed your son Nathan” and “Fuck you you fucking whore worshipers I’ll kill you now!!!”

It’s enough to lose a kid. To have to go through this? It marks a sick society. So I am furious at the world, and have been every day since Dathan died. But I also see peace in the record — the courage of a kid who laid it all out, and got everything in return.

Here, then, is writing not to explain, but to reclaim. To rise up to Dathan’s throne. 

Dathan had a dying wish for his bones to be cremated and pulverized for use in a sculpting medium. He specified that depending on the amount of bone intact after firing, some could also be taken as larger pieces for incorporation into a piece of art. 

Actually, no. Better to leave free use of his remains to the discretion of a local artist. Best yet, he advised me, a collective. And he encouraged me to broaden my ideas about what might form a collective. Could be a man and his twelve pet rats, he said. 

I asked, if he did have a say in it, what kind of artwork could he see himself in?

"Served up on a tray with tequila," he said. He suggested smaller toe and finger fragments might best be suited to vials of liquor. But the main bits — skull, femur, rib — those could all go on the tray. And ideally the tray would be clothed in patterns evoking something of the inner deepness of life: zig-zags, spinning whorls, starbursts. 

“Also don’t mind if the chemist gets a selection or two from my corpse,” he said. 

Up to the very end, pointing to something that should have outlasted Ally and I.

Lito and Rey organized the paddle-out. They rolled over the breakwaters with long-stalked Birds of Paradise in their mouths. Ally and I followed them to a calmer bit of ocean, and together with our friends we formed a large circle and joined hands.

The brothers tossed their flowers to the center before their remembrances. 

Lito said: “I used to spend all this time thinking that not having a kid would keep me surfing. But then to know a kid like Dathan, and you see it wouldn’t have worked out like that. I would’ve had to do it still. Because he was out here. And he took it like all of us. It makes me so sad, all of this, like he’s my kid too. But I know bro would be here for any of us. Shit, he would probably beat us out to the spot. And that rules. That keeps.”

Rey said: “Dathan was young, but he was love. I will never say goodbye.”

To our friends: Thank you. You’re the part of Ally and I that can still draw up courage.

And to Dathan: We miss you, and if we do it again, it will be because of you. 

This is a work of fiction. The events, characters, and locales contained within it are solely the product of the author's imagination, or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is pure coincidence.