“I don’t mind at all if you forget this,” British journalist Decca Aitkenhead declares in the prologue to her memoir, All at Sea. “The important thing is that I don’t.”
Aitkenhead’s book, for the record, is not in the least forgettable. She writes to remember Tony Wilkinson, the father of her two sons, her partner of 10 years, who died while swimming to save their 4-year-old, Jake, swept out past his depth by the riptide running beneath the seemingly placid waters of Jamaica’s Calabash Bay. The family was vacationing in a “scruffy little fishing village” called Treasure Beach, the author’s home away from home for nearly two decades. Wilkinson was not a confident swimmer. By the time friends dragged him back to shore he’d inhaled enough salt water into his lungs to suffocate.
Wilkinson’s sensational death had nothing on his sensational life: All at Sea traces the story of how he and Aitkenhead became, as she writes, “the most implausible couple I have ever known.” Wilkinson once jokingly wondered: “If we had both signed up for Internet dating sites, what algorithm in the world would have matched us up?” When they met as neighbors, Aitkenhead, white, educated, middle-class, was a journalist for The Guardian. Wilkinson, brown, uneducated, a product of the foster care system, was an ex-con, an ex-hustler, and a current drug dealer nursing a crack addiction. Both were unhappily married. They cultivated a flirtation into a lasting relationship, and Wilkinson improbably managed to turn his life around, kicking his crack habit, earning a college degree, and landing a job working at a London charity.
For Wilkinson to survive the deficits of his childhood and early adulthood only to be felled in his prime by the Caribbean Sea is true poetic injustice. Aitkenhead’s book is a close register of the year after his death, a warts-and-all account of her most irrational and despairing thoughts, feelings, and impulses. Suddenly a single parent, she has to reimagine her future alone and face a new, uneasy identity as a high-profile public widow in a society discomfited by any real display of mourning. And for the sake of her children, she is forced to contend with her dysfunctional relationship to sadness, a mode of repression learned in childhood from her own mother, who approached a terminal breast cancer diagnosis, and the prospect of leaving behind her four young children, with a disturbingly cheerful pragmatism.
Further poetic injustice: About three weeks after handing in her manuscript, Aitkenhead received her own breast cancer diagnosis. She spent the year after Wilkinson’s death fighting for her life. I chatted with the author, now in remission, by phone about All at Sea, cancer, and why her family had to return to the waters where Wilkinson drowned to move forward. “It’s funny, it sounds like a literary device, swimming, some kind of metaphor,” she mused. “It didn’t feel like a literary device. It felt like a very real, tangible sense of survival.”
In writing the book, you were less concerned about what Tony might want—in fact, it seems like he would have liked you to write a book about him—and more about how it would affect your ability to divulge or not divulge the darker parts of Tony’s past to your sons. Can you elaborate on that?
I knew that Tony would have wanted me to write the book, and I was fairly sure that I did. But the big question, of course, was: Is this the right thing for my kids? On the one hand I worried, when they were older, would they feel that I’d written about them and their lives without their consent? Perhaps crucially, would they feel territorial about my memories? Neither of them will have any memories of their dad. Had I done them a disservice by letting anyone with 15 quid in their pockets go into a bookshop and know [almost] as much about their dad as they’ll ever know?
Early after Tony died, I remember thinking, Oh, my God, I’m now the gatekeeper of Tony’s biography. When they were born, Tony was a mature student. He then went to work at a charity, and he died a hero. I know this from my own experience: If your parent dies when you’re very young, grown-ups will be awkward and unsure about what to say. There’s a danger that they’ll say nothing.
All that will be left is the one version of Tony the hero. I didn’t want all the other truths of Tony’s life to get lost. I knew it was going to be my responsibility to tell the kids that their dad had been addicted to crack and he’d been in prison, and that he’d been a violent criminal. I could see how easy it would be to withhold that information or to edit it, to keep thinking, We’ll come to that when they’re older, until it got to a point that they were so old that it would have felt like treachery to suddenly divulge this whole other side to their dad.
And so much of why I felt such respect and admiration for Tony was precisely because he overcame such unbelievable difficulties. He did something almost nobody I know has ever really done: genuinely, authentically change his life. That was Tony’s greatest strength, his capacity to decide that a choice that he’d made at one point in life was no longer serving him, and he was going to change it. I think that’s more heroic than anything.
You’ve referred to this book as something like taking your clothes off in public. In the memoir, you write about your utter aversion to karaoke. Compared to karaoke, how vulnerable did publishing this make you feel?
Certainly nothing like as vulnerable as if you told me that I had to go onstage in half an hour and perform a karaoke song. Why did I not feel more vulnerable? I suppose at the risk of sounding sort of pseudo-mystical, there is something invincibly robust and fortifying about truth. But that’s not really a satisfactory answer. There are all sorts of things that are true, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to share them.
I think probably the real answer has a lot to do with having spent the year between finishing the book and its publication being treated for cancer. I guess I felt as if I’d completely kind of fallen off the edge of the world, and two years of my life had just been entirely lost. Taking all of my clothes off felt preferable to literally having disappeared. That they hadn’t been two years of unmitigated loss, I suppose.
I have a feeling that cancer’s the answer. Is it just because you’re relieved to still be there? So you don’t mind people knowing everything?
A big chunk of the book is dedicated to your memories of the loss of your mother from cancer. You handed in your manuscript a few weeks before you yourself were diagnosed. Would you have written about your mom differently had the diagnosis come before you finished the book?
God, I thought about her so much in the early weeks after diagnosis. It wouldn’t change anything that I’ve written, but if I were writing it now, post-cancer, I would certainly have more to add. It happened almost overnight that I began to emotionally withdraw from my children. I tried to build some kind of psychological wall that would protect me from the unimaginable horror of knowing that I was dying and that I was leaving them. My initial instinct on diagnosis was, I am clearly going to die of this disease. So the first weeks were informed by that absolute assumption. And I thought about my mom, having a year where she knew she was going to die, to leave behind four children. I think it would have been literally impossible for her not to have done something along the lines of what I did.
Luckily for me I got into treatment, and I began to think that maybe I would live. She knew she was going to die. I think that fate has, quite by accident, given me an insight into what happened while she was terminally ill. That’s been really helpful for me in understanding this strange sense of distance I had from my mum.
As a journalist, you admit that you’d been writing about real people for years and hadn’t really grasped that they were real. Has the act of going through all these trials changed you as a journalist?
Yeah, for better and for worse. I definitely was deluding myself for all the years before this happened, when I imagined that I had this capacity for particularly insightful, imaginative empathy. I now know that to be a complete fallacy. I do now feel that when I go to interview people whose lives have suddenly fallen apart, I have an insight that I didn’t have before. I think that’s made me a better journalist in terms of knowing what to ask and how to ask it. [But] maybe in order to be a good journalist, it’s necessary to think that the person you’re writing about is not quite real. I’ve noticed I found it harder to have that brutal detachment and objectivity.
I’d like to believe there’s room in journalism for empathizing with your subject . . .
I really hope it’s possible to be both compassionate and objective. Obviously editors love journalists who just don’t give a fuck, don’t they? Certainly British newspaper editors do. And I think it would be very difficult for me to be that person now.
At the end of the book, you take your family back to Jamaica, and find some peace there that had eluded you at home. Is that a function of time, or do Jamaicans understand something about the process of grieving that Brits, and likely Americans, don’t?
Everyone thought the trip was a bad idea. I was fully prepared to think they might be right. I think the reason why it changed things for us so much is partly about Jamaicans’ relationship to death. Tony’s death didn’t alter the universe for them. As I write, they know that people die randomly all the time. The truth is that most of the people on this planet know you might be dead tomorrow, and it might be from dodgy water, a rusty nail, a crocodile. I happen to belong to this tiny rarefied subset of the global population that takes a life span of 80 years as a kind of birthright.
It was partly about being around people who weren’t awkward and embarrassed and confused by a young and sudden death. But it was really more about seeing my kids shake off some of their fear, and I think that could only be done by revisiting the place where it happened, being around people who’d been there. He died there, and then we got on a plane and came home; it was as if all those memories were frozen in time, until we went back to that place and time.
I could see that this might seem like quite an inconsequential thing: this thing about Jake overcoming his fear of water, getting back in the water and swimming. Partly it’s just that had Tony spent his childhood in and out of the water, like my kids are spending theirs, he’d still be alive now. It was his fear of water that made him panic.
But that’s not why I’m glad to see Jake confident in the water. It’s because for me, that symbolizes the confidence in himself and the world. And until that was regained, I couldn’t really see how we were going to move forward. That felt absolutely central to our survival of Tony’s death: for him to swim in that specific ocean. I don’t think we could have got what that gave us in any other way. Had we still not gone back, I think there would have been something that would have been arrested within us.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
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