content warning: suicide
when the separatists (/colonisers) landed in plymouth in 1620, 102 people disembarked from the mayflower in order to make a new life for themselves in an unknown land. they knew there must be natives in the area, and so they cling to the shore. they were many months later than they’d planned to be, and much farther north, and particularly after months at sea, they were unsuited for what a new england winter was going to have in store for them. before spring, half of them would be dead.
the first death is the only one not catalogued in detail by the company’s would-be historian, william bradford. it’s also the most curious. only a few days after landing, dorothy bradford, william’s first wife (foreshadowing!), stepped off the mayflower and drowned. or maybe she slipped. or maybe she was pushed.
we don’t know an enormous amount about her, personally. that’s not incredibly unusual for a woman in the 17th century, but you’d think while will was busy writing down the history of the colony, his wife’s death would at least make some headlines. some historians have ventured that his grief was too strong to write about her, but i’d argue right back that he immediately wrote to her best friend, alice, whom they had left in holland, and had her on the next ship to the new world so he could marry her. in his of Plymouth Plantation, his only note on this is “of william bradford: his wife died, and he married again” so, you know, do what you want with that.
dorothy had been forced to her leave her 3 year old son behind in holland to be cared for by her parents. by accounts, she had a difficult time making that decision, though she understood months at sea and setting up a new colony was probably not the best environment for a toddler.
critics of the dorothy suicide narrative point to a story written by jane austin (not that one) which has no historical facts behind it. they also point out, fairly, that it was cold and slippery and she was probably suffering from sea sickness and scurvy and malnutrition. all those things are valid points. they usually go on to say that if she had killed herself, it would have been very bad for the colony press and used as a weapon against them. i think, personally, they hit something here that they don’t realise: that doesn’t mean she didn’t kill herself, not at all. in fact, that’s exactly what would happen if she had - the folks onboard know what it would mean. they’ve been ostracised from their own communities, both in england and in holland. their investors (ah, capitalism) might pull back on this deal if it goes badly, and the wife of the governor killing herself a few days after arriving is pretty much the top shelf of bad press.
later, cotton mather (yep, that one) would write that she “accidentally drowned after slipping”, which historians usually take at face value. but to that i say: cotton was a pretty huge drama queen and also he wasn’t there, either. maybe no one was. no one has ever claimed to be. maybe they merely discovered her body floating in the late morning and assumed she slipped. maybe they watched her step off the side and decided right then and there it was better to have not seen what they saw.
other historians have argued that saying dorothy’s death was a possible suicide is keeping apace with the idea of feminine weakness. here is where we diverge in thinking - i think it’s the height of misogyny to not allow women the same authority and agency as men when it comes to offing ourselves. i am nothing if not a pragmatic equalist.
does it matter if dorothy stepped off that ship herself or if she fell by accident? she’s still dead. her child is motherless, even if he doesn’t know it. would it matter more if she was pushed off? the 17th century was not unknown for that kind of cruelty, just like any other century.
these are the lessons that the dead can teach us: some things we aren’t meant to know. against unanswerable questions, we can only keep moving and keep building, to keep the terrible winter at bay.
my first not-fun life lesson from dead people happened when i was 17. my mother’s brother was one of the only adults in my life that i trusted, and the only person i felt that really understood me. obviously i was wrong on that last part, but as a very weird teenager, that was one of the primary ways i related to adults - they were fine, as long as they “got” me.
here’s the thing: i’ll never know if he meant to. for a long, long time, that bothered me the most, wondering whether he went out there knowing. whether he packed his things, carefully deciding what was important enough to carry on his final voyage, or whether the universe, whatever holds it together, decided for him, regardless of what he did or did not carry.
it doesn’t bother me anymore - or at least, i don’t wonder at it. his demons are mine - those good old family genetics - and though i’d like to think i’m a better fighter than he was, i know now: maybe he planned it, maybe he didn’t, maybe he asked the sea to decide, and she gave her ruling with thunder and rain. i hope he saw that distant green light one last time, and i hope when he was floating at peace, his consciousness on a different shore, that his eyes got to see the stars, endlessly reflecting in the current.
i remember waking in a cold sweat in the basement. i don’t even remember why i was sleeping there, but i remember it was damp and my mother was crying already, and in the darkest, most twisted part of my gut (i have an IBD so it’s pretty dark and twisted in there) i already knew as she was telling me: michael was dead. they pulled his body from the sea that afternoon.
but michael’s story does not end with the ocean - in some ways, i wish it had. whatever brought him out on the brisk morning of january 20 none of us will ever know, but death brought him back in the late afternoon of january 21, cold and grey, and laid him on the table in a dark mortuary for an official autopsy, and with it, something darker.
i was 17 when he died. i’d thought of myself as an adult, and i pretended to be one, or what i thought adults were like. i thought i’d understood him, understood all of us. but though michael wasn’t even a constant presence in our family lives, his death fractured us, like a rock that puts a small crack in your windshield and then suddenly, inside a few hours, you can’t even see through the glass properly anymore. everything happened in whispers, tiny snippets of conversation at the doors or the stairs - all the transitory places in the house. we were all coming or going from nowhere, waiting, waiting all the time for the funeral, and then the burial, and then all the other times that death haunts - first holidays, anniversaries, birthdays.
at 17 i knew michael. after we buried him, though, i was forced to mourn two deaths: the man i thought he was, and the man who really existed and now did not. the body we put in the ground was unburdened by both of those realities, and so i carried the weight of them, the weight of learning - he was an alcoholic, and a mean one.
i thought discovering the horrible things about him would be my undoing. i remember the pain of it, of listening to my father describe some events in detail - in part, i think, only because he was angry at all the pain it caused my mother, and to watch the good man i believed my uncle to be to be washed away in equal measure. in the aftermath, i thought i understood the way death creates a life - whatever michael had done, or hadn’t done, it was over. he couldn’t hurt or help anyone else. and all of us were left to keep the memories we’d had of him, free to build whatever narrative suited us and those memories.
in the aftermath, i found myself wondering about dorothy a lot. whether she and my uncle shared the same dark things in different measures. whether the sun was in the same cold place it was for her as it was for him, and whether the ocean waves met greeted them with the same measures before it ushered the parts of them that could care away to someplace safe, leaving behind only the hollow evidence.
this was the thing about death: i picked at it for years, and years, before i began to understand what it was that drew me to it. because it seemed that death was so final, that it was a door closed. But it’s not. death is the open window - not everything gets through, but with the right breeze, the air inside changes. i was 34, and sitting next to my grandfather in the hospital while he was beginning to leave the world, when my mother, joining in on the deathside conversations of my grandfather’s life, told a story of going through michael’s things after his autopsy, and finding a wedge of cheese in his jacket pocket, intact still from the water - his final homage to wallace and gromit, frozen in time. and suddenly, just like that, the man i’d known my whole childhood - silly and persistent and always ready to make a joke - was right there like we’d summoned him, like he’d always been.
of course, the cheese kind of answers the question, doesn’t it? who brings cheese on a final voyage and doesn’t eat it? not dorothy, certainly. so maybe that’s all the difference between meaning to and leaving it up to the universe: a bit of cheese.