Water Wings

My daughter Chaya has always loved the water.

When we lived on Vancouver Island from about 1984 she was out all summer sun tanning on a big beach towel at the ages of 3 and 4, and before I knew what had happened was swimming. As far as I know she never needed water wings, she had invisible ones.

When we moved back to Vancouver in 1992, she was 11 years old. She came over with me on the ferry first to find a place to live and we found a basement suite in Kits and the family followed.

That summer, her mother took her daughters to the Aquatic Centre to swim, and I watched from the gallery in amazement as my daughter, who had never dived from a high board before, followed her mom off the 7.5 meter board without an ounce of hesitation or fear. They went up and off, just like that. I was reminded of a mother duck with her duckling following behind.

She, her sister Nika and brother Ky had all been home-schooled on the island, but when we came to Vancouver, she made the decision to go to school and the others followed suit. She started off in grade 5, always excelled and never looked back. She was the honor roll all the years at Kits High School. She crafted braided and beaded friendship bracelets, and made me a new one every few months.

In her last year of high school, our family friend and the kids’ godfather Herb loaned her money for enrollment in a lifeguard course, and in very short order, she was suited up in red and on the job at Kits Beach.

It seems that red was Chaya’s lucky color as I have an equally vivid memory of her walking down 4th Avenue in her new Safeway cashier’s uniform, and me the proud papa going to meet her.

It didn’t take long for the manager at Safeway to recognize her potential and he began counseling her and mentoring her for management training. At the age of 22, she was Safeway’s youngest assistant manager.

She soon found her own apartment, had a spiffy red sports car, and was on top of the world. Then early this year she developed a bad cough that would not go away. It went on for a month or more until one day it got so bad she left work to go to a walk-in clinic. They took an x-ray. She was diagnosed with cancer.

When she started her chemo, one of the first things she said to me was, “I was so looking forward to swimming this summer, and now I won’t be able to.” During the course of the chemo, I went through a period of depression and wondered if she would make it. Maybe she would never be able to swim again, and we would lose her?

Today, she went for her first swim this year since finishing chemo last week, and I went to the Aquatic Centre to watch, and sat in almost the same place where I first watched her jump off the high board. The memories flooded back.

She is a strong swimmer and when she took a break, she came over to talk to me and I said, “You look like a natural in there!” She replied, “I feel like I never missed a beat.”

As I walked home along the seawall, I was making the connection between her strength in swimming, her survival instincts and the constant presence in her life of those invisible water wings!