Our family’s tradition of vacationing in the Outer Banks with my husband’s family stretches back to 1989. This cherished coastal strip holds a special place in our hearts, a repository of countless memories, especially from when my children were growing up. It’s these very loved ones that my son, Charles, celebrated in his rap song, Family Matters.
Walking along the beach one morning at low tide, a wave of nostalgia washed over me as I recalled Charles skimboarding. With boundless energy, he’d sprint towards the water, launching his board onto the shallow surface, gliding effortlessly across the wet sand like a hovercraft. His light frame allowed him to ride seemingly forever.
Lost in this vivid memory of Charles, the familiar pang of grief surfaced, settling heavily in my heart, and tears welled up.
Oh, how I longed to see his mop of curly hair tossed by the sea breeze again, to witness his slender figure leaping onto a boogie board in the ocean, to hear his laughter mingling with his cousins’. But as quickly as this mental movie played, it vanished, leaving behind only the vast, empty beach.
Later that week, watching from our cottage porch, I observed children from neighboring cottages engaged in the joyful pursuit of ghost crabbing. Their excited shouts and the bobbing beams of their flashlights filled the evening air, triggering another flood of happy memories. Ghost crabbing, a quintessential beach activity, involves nets, buckets, flashlights, and, of course, a lively crew of cousins, siblings, and friends.
Under the cloak of darkness, hundreds of sand crabs emerge, scurrying across the sand. They sense your footsteps, instinctively darting out of the way. Without a flashlight, their presence would remain unseen, a hidden world beneath your feet.
But with the flick of a flashlight, these nocturnal creatures are revealed, scattered across the beach, making you wonder how you managed not to step on one. The game is simple: shine the light directly at a crab to freeze it in its tracks, then swiftly scoop it up with a net. Or, in Charles’s case, sometimes he’d even catch them by hand.
The children would eagerly fill their buckets with crabs, a wriggling mass of claws clicking against the plastic, desperate to escape. Once the bucket brimmed with these tiny crustaceans, they would release them back onto the sand.
Charles, with his playful spirit, would often challenge a crab to a duel using a broken sea oat as a sword. He’d engage in mock sword fights with the crab, watching as it puffed itself up, brandishing its large pincer menacingly, attempting to intimidate an opponent many times its size. After a brief skirmish, once the crab had pinched the sea oat, Charles would lose interest, eager to rejoin his brother and cousins, leaving the crab to retreat back into one of the countless holes dotting the soft sand.
Charles lived for these moments, for these shared experiences with family. From the first hint of nightfall, he would eagerly implore his grandpa to start the ghost crabbing adventure, leading the charge onto the beach. Like the timeless joy of trick-or-treating, he never outgrew it, participating with his younger cousins even as a teenager.
Not all beach vacations were filled with such idyllic memories. Yet, the abundance of good times overshadowed the bad, which is partly why his suicide remained incomprehensible. He seemed to extract so much joy and vitality from life.
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Did Charles show warning signs for teen suicide?
