Mother grieves for daughter whose fate she'll never know
CUMBERLAND, R.I. - Holding a conch shell into which she had tucked a letter to her daughter, Mary Grinavic stood alone on the deck of the Arabella and looked into the passing waves of the Atlantic.
Miles from where she was cruising a few weeks ago along the northern edge of the Virgin Islands, her 26-year-old daughter, Christine, and three others had been lost and presumed dead a year ago when a storm pummeled the vessel they were sailing to Maryland. Reaching over the Arabella's railing, Mary Grinavic let go of the shell, the letter it held, and the hope that someday her only child would be found.
"The last thing I saw was the pink underside of the shell going under," she said. "It was, 'Bye honey, my sweet baby girl.' "
Grief for a daughter whose fate she will never know for sure prompted the trip and the May 3 launching of a goodbye note into the ocean depths. Among the families and friends of the crew members who vanished after the Flying Colours sent its final distress signal on May 7, 2007, Mary Grinavic has endured an agonizing series of losses.
Christine Grinavic's last visit home to Cumberland was for the funeral of her grandmother - Mary's mother - in December 2006. A few months later, five weeks after the Flying Colours disappeared, Mary Grinavic was bagging trash with her husband, James. While clinging to the slender hope that their daughter had survived, they were joking and trying to do normal things when he suffered a heart attack, crumpled to the ground, and died. Then in December, on the anniversary of her mother's funeral, Mary Grinavic's father died.
A longtime principal at Elm Street School in Walpole, Grinavic took a leave of absence at the end of April.
"I've come to realize that I have lost four people, and the others have lost one, and I need to give myself time to go through this," she said. "Now, I just have my brother left."
The past year and a half, she said, has taught lessons in sadness, among them that the deaths of loved ones are unequal, as is each grieving process. Her parents were elderly and she was with her husband during his last moments alive, making their deaths marginally easier to bear.
It is when she speaks of her daughter that tears flow more readily, because no one will ever know what happened during the last minutes of Christine Grinavic and the others on the Flying Colours: Patrick Topping, 39; Jason Franks, 34; and Rhiannon Borisoff, 22.
Tim Dargan, first mate on the schooner Arabella, upon which Christine Grinavic worked as part of the deck crew before taking time off to help sail the Flying Colours back to Maryland, said closure is always elusive for those in the sailing community. His friends, he said, are on the water for long trips, so it's common to go months without seeing each other.
"Personally, I've still not fully accepted the situation," Dargan, who lives in Newport, R.I., said of the disappearance of his friends on the Flying Colours. "To this day, I keep thinking I'll walk into a place and see one of them."
As for Mary Grinavic, he said, "It's amazing how well she's handling it. She's stronger than anyone I've ever met, really. In the space of a year she's lost her entire family, basically. I can't imagine what that's like."
"You don't know what you can deal with until you have to," Grinavic said yesterday as she sat on the deck outside her home on a quiet street. "Just learning to ride the wave of grief is where I am right now. How do you make sense of it? There is no sense to be made is the answer."
Photos of Christine, some with her father, fill shelves and walls throughout the house. After growing up in Cumberland, she went to Macalester College in Minnesota, then studied in New Zealand, where she fell in love with sailing. When she graduated from the University of Rhode Island, office jobs held little allure, her mother said. The ocean did.
Though Christine Grinavic was only 26 when the Flying Colours vanished, she had visited 19 countries, a pin marking each port on a world map in her Cumberland bedroom.
"All four of them lived more in their short lives than anyone could have hoped for," Dargan said of the Flying Colours crew.
Mary Grinavic held a funeral Mass on May 7, the anniversary of the last distress signal, and with the other three families held a service in Newport on May 10 at the Seaman's Church Institute. That night, as Mary Grinavic went to sleep, she was thinking about what she should plant on her parents' graves the next morning on Mother's Day.
"I had a dream that I was walking out of the Seaman's Institute and Christine was waiting outside," she said. "She said, 'Mom, I just wanted to say hi,' and she handed me a small white azalea bush. Then I woke up and thought, 'Now I know what I have to buy.' It was so comforting for her to come to me on Mother's Day and just say hi, and I know she's with me every day."
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com. 