A boat for Torin: How indescribable pain led a family to hope

Duncan Passmore

I am a husband, a father and a woodworker, my wife Siân is an artist from Wales, and this is a story about our boy and his boat.

From a very early age, Torin was fascinated with how things worked. His curiosity penetrated deeper than the surface level of things.

When he was around two and a half, he asked me “where are stars born”? Another time he asked me if the underworld was real.

A little over 12 years ago, when he was ten months old Torin was diagnosed with a very rare, incurable and progressive form of mitochondrial disease.

We were told that he would unlikely live long enough to get to secondary school. For a very long time we kept death at bay.

We were not hostile to it and so we were able to become familiar with grief and uncertainty in intimate ways.

The hard stuff

All we wanted to do was live as fully we could with Torin in the time we had left with him. So it had to include everything even the hard stuff.

As time passed, Torin’s illness became more and more apparent, we had to deal with both its progression and his growing awareness of his disease.

Not long ago, I asked Torin this question: “If you could go anywhere in the world where would it be?”

He answered: “Windermere, I would want you to take me sailing on Lake Windermere so we can land on Wild Cat Island. Just like they do in Swallows and Amazons”.

After checking he understood my question correctly and assuring him he could go anywhere in the world, he confirmed his choice as the Lake District in Cumbria. We started looking into it and making plans but that’s as far as we got.

One year ago during a routine surgical procedure Torin contracted sepsis whilst in hospital.

Five weeks after the surgery, he died very suddenly in the early hours of the morning, he was very nearly twelve years old.

The shock, the horror, the grief. All consuming. He was kind, stubborn, intelligent, loving and ever so gentle.

A small boat

In the days and weeks following his death, our community of friends and family gathered around as we crafted a painfully beautiful funeral. Friends made a small boat for him to be buried in.

Forty of us paddled him down the river Dart singing all the way.

Three hundred were there at the graveside waiting for us. A holy man held the ceremony for us.

The name Torin means “Chief” and we gave him a chieftain’s burial.

A boat for Torin

Together, we are going to build a fourteen foot traditional wooden sailing dinghy, just like the ones in Swallows and Amazons.

Siân is an artist and gifted with the remarkable ability to create beauty with whatever it is her hands get to make.

I’m blessed beyond words to have her as my wife, as the mother to my children and as a companion in a world where our son is no longer physically with us.

There is clearly a boat theme here, from my canoeing adventures with the kids on the river Dart to Torin’s burial boat.

A prayer

From us forty paddling him down river one last time to now the sailing boat. I find it uncanny how in cultures the world over boats and bodies of water feature in the journey between life and the afterlife.

From Ancient Greek, Egyptian, Norse and Mayan cultures to name but a few. Always the person who has died must undertake a journey from the shores of this world to the next.

Torin’s funeral was our first attempt at doing what we could in our broken state to make sure he gets to where he needs to get to.

One year on, and still broken, we want to do something devotional that acknowledges his beauty and the humility we now experience in the “spiralling gyre” that life just is.

And so, the boat and the building of it will be a prayer. A prayer of gratitude to the boy who is our son and a prayer of gratitude to the unfathomable mystery which makes possible all of our lives and all of our deaths.

Over the years as a craftsman, I’ve learned to be humbled by the process of making.

It seems that there’s a difference between hunting down meaning, with an idea of what it will be when and if you find it, and having two hands and a heart involved in creating the conditions where it might appear.

Today

It’s been almost a month since a Guardian article went out into the world, highlighting our Crowdfunder to make Torin’s boat a reality.

Overnight we went from wondering if we would ever be able to reach the target and therefore realistically build the boat to the relief of knowing that it is going to happen.

Those of you who have run crowdfunders before will know how Sisyphean it can feel at times.

But far from being pointless, it seemed necessary at the time to be asking the why and what for questions in the moments when it all hung in the balance.

Now the one thing that hangs in the balance is whether or not Siân and I are actually capable of building a boat together that floats. I have every confidence. 

Our friend Martin Shaw published a beautiful essay on Death featuring, among others, some words about Torin’s death and funeral.

Years before our boy died, Siân and I had spoken to Martin asking if he would be the person to uphold the ceremony when that day came.

He accepted, knowing what that task would ask of him. His words are written from that perspective, from the person carrying a heavy and deep responsibility on the day.

We will be forever grateful and indebted to Martin for taking on that role for us and Torin and the wider community. I mean that.

Being indebted to another person doesn’t mean you necessarily owe them anything other than kindness and friendship, your love in essence.

It involves sticking around for long enough so that when the inevitable times of need arrive you can lean on one another as you navigate the rough ground up ahead. 

We have lived here in the Dart Valley for fifteen years where we were married and have raised our little family.

In that time a strong thread of community has been spun around us throughout the years we were given with our boy.

When he died, that thread became a tightly woven fabric of friendship that wrapped itself around us like a blanket.

It is what enabled us to have those precious moments we so needed with Torin in the time between his death and his burial.

On our own, we could not have made his funeral the collective day of prayer that it became. We consider ourselves to be wealthy beyond measure though not so much in monetary terms.

A good portion of our wealth comes through the love of the people around us and the place we all call home.

Hungry for meaning

And so to you we are also indebted in a similar way, you who dug your hands into your pockets and generously gave whatever you could.

Here’s a thing I’ve learned over the years; Community and friendship in our 21st century techno dominant world are hungry for meaning and thirsty for life.

What they need from us is to share with each other. Not so much what we think or, more importantly, what we think others should see and hear.

Community and friendships require the broken hearted version of each us, the only real version there is. Not a lot can happen otherwise.

There’s no real nourishment available to a community if it doesn’t include the heartbreak of a life worn bravely on the outside.

What we seem to have collectively forgotten is that by reducing or even eviscerating grief and heartbreak from our external lives we reduce our capacity to see beauty even when it surrounds us.

No grief, no beauty and no real journey ahead other than going round and round in circles a bit like Sisyphus. 

By seeing years ago that up ahead and not very far away we would have to say an indescribably painful goodbye to our son, we knew we couldn’t do it alone.

Maybe we had to get good at sharing these things because we knew it would mean the obliteration of all we knew and loved and held dear. I am glad. Glad to be sharing with you our story.

I can’t be glad that my son is dead, I never will be.

But I can be glad for what we all did because of the miracle that he came and then went away.

With love,

Duncan and Siân

Visit the family’s Crowdfunder here.