The Fixed Point

This essay originally appeared on my Substack here.

My mother was named Gypsy and never went anywhere. Yesterday I dove her dive site coordinates.

Gypsy was uncoordinated. Now she has her own coordinates.

N 16.2928033 W -86.6025868. That is her. Off Roatán, inside the marine park, on a chart, permanently.

I donated the site at the end of May. We were out shopping, the way we did, and I told her about it between errands. She went through several name iterations before she landed on one.

Gypsy’s Jewel. “That’s what you are to me, honey.”

I did the dedication dive in June and she got to see it. “How cool!! I love it!” she texted. Three exclamation points, because she did not believe in rationing them.

I did not know it would be a memorial site by early July.

Yesterday I dove it for the first time since her service.

What a coordinate actually is

A coordinate is not a destination. It is a reference.

On the boat you are not looking for the pretty part of the reef. You are looking for a number you can return to. Weather changes. Visibility changes. The reef itself changes. Coral dies. Storms rearrange the sand. The number does not.

Her father named her Gypsy, which is a joke the universe made and then let stand, because she stayed rooted in Alabama her whole life. Seventy-eight years, most of them within an hour of where she started.

I am the one who left. Greyhound bus to college, then a credit card at 25% interest for a trip I could not afford, then business school in France, then ten years across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Moved continents five times.

She wanted me to stay. She knew I needed out. So she gave me wings.

One of us had to hold position.

Birmingham Downtown Bus Terminal en route to Wake Forest University

She Was Never Graceful.

I want to be accurate about her, because the glamorized version of a dead mother is not a real one.

She was headlining a conference once. New shoes, hair done. She realized she had left something in her purse and ran back to her office. In the time it took her to turn around, the janitor had pulled a mop cart in front of the doorway.

She went into it headfirst. Legs flailing while her assistant Juanita pulled her out.

She picked the garbage out of her hair, dusted her new dress off, and walked back into the room. Then she gave her talk on supercomputing.

A few hours later her ribs started hurting, and she decided the air in there was getting hard to breathe. Then her feet started too, and she decided it was the new shoes.

We found out after the convention ended that she had broken ribs and broken toes.

That was my mother. The show had to go on.

I told that story first in her eulogy. A church full of people sniffling, and they burst out laughing, because most of them already knew it.

She was physically uncoordinated her whole life, and it got worse. Near the end she was working a camera from a wheelchair, and in a picture she took of me at a mall in Alabama on Memorial Day she is laughing behind the lens because her hands would not cooperate.

She could not sing either. I found an old voicemail where she tried her best at happy birthday. Dolly Parton, she was not. Steel Magnolia, she was.

None of that is the same thing as being unsteady.

She broke two sets of bones and did not notice until the work was finished. Clumsy is what the body does. Position is a separate decision.

She earned a PhD at night as a single mother. She was a supercomputing pioneer in the eighties, when almost nobody in those rooms looked or sounded like her. Her thick Southern drawl made people underestimate her. She stood on stages talking about what technology was going to do for us before most people understood there was anything to talk about.

And she built retirement savings on a teacher’s salary, one disciplined deposit at a time, for decades.

She was a saver. I became a risk-maker. And now I steward her savings with by investing in founders and ideas with Chalant Capital.

We argued about it, gently, the way you argue with the person you are actually made of. She heard risk and thought danger. I heard safety and thought ceiling.

Both of us were right. You cannot measure motion without something anchored. She anchored. I moved. Neither one works alone.

What leaders are navigating by

Every leader is taking a bearing off something. Very few of them could tell you what it is.

A compass gives you direction. On a night dive it is the only thing in front of you telling the truth, and it still cannot tell you where you are.

For position you need a second instrument. A point on a chart that does not move, that you measure from.

Boards ask for vision. Almost nobody asks the other question, which is what you are measuring from. A destination without a reference point is a direction you feel strongly about, and feelings drift.

I have sat with chief executives whose only fixed point was the next quarter’s number. Watch that company over three years. Every decision is locally defensible and the whole thing wanders, because the reference itself keeps moving, and you cannot see drift from inside the thing that is drifting.

The steady ones have something that does not move. Sometimes it is a person, often a dead one. Sometimes it is a standard they got from someone who would still be disappointed in them, and they know exactly what that disappointment would sound like.

And when a leader’s reference point dies, the drift starts before anyone notices. Including them.

I know. Mine died in July.

Birmingham

She left the medical decision to me.

I went alone to the crematorium.

That morning I put on makeup and curled my hair, just how she liked it. She loved feeling pretty.

My hands did not shake when I pressed the start button.

Only I could.

Afterward I sat in my car and watched the plume of smoke rise over the Birmingham skyline.

Her own coordinates

The last text I sent her said, “see you in the stars, Mama.”

I dive during new moons on purpose, so it is as dark as it gets. Pressure above me and almost no ambient light. I do it to find out what I trust when I cannot see.

I have a moon and stars tattooed on my shoulder from April, before any of this. I got it as a reminder that we navigate by what we cannot always see clearly and trust anyway. Sailors did it for thousands of years. You take a sighting on something impossibly far away that you will never reach, and it tells you exactly where you are.

So there is a joke in this too, and she would get it.

The woman who navigated by faith ended up with a latitude and a longitude.

Printed. Verifiable. Findable by anyone with a boat.

And I got the stars.

A few days before she died I asked her what she wanted to be remembered for. One word.

Kind.

Yesterday I hugged her buoy while a group of divers who never met her bowed their heads. Then we went down, and the current took us the way it always does, and the site held its position on the chart the way she held hers for fifty-one years while I went everywhere.

Gypsy’s Jewel, West End, Roatan Honduras

Not all of her is there.

She talked about taking a cruise her whole life. She never took one.

I said no to this one. A ship to Greenland for a total eclipse. Then I said yes, two days after she died.

We flew from New York to Iceland to make the ship in time. On a Gulfstream, for her first and last time.

Greyhound to Gulfstream. She would have loved it.

Some of her went into the sea off East Greenland during Totality, the full two minutes of it, while the light went out. There were a hundred and fifty of us on that ship, and a man I had sat next to at lunch that day had brought his father’s ashes too. We let them go when the sun disappeared behind the moon, together. None of that water has a name.

So I have her both ways now. A number anyone with a boat can find, and a dispersal in the North Atlantic that cannot be marked.

Three times I have gone into the dark on purpose to find out where I am. A new moon. A total eclipse. A moon and stars on my shoulder for the nights there is nothing else.

She is the fixed point. She is also a number I can return to. She is also gone into water with no coordinates at all.

I said this next part first in her church.

My brother and I were standing together at the front of it, repaired after eight years of silence. It was the one thing she wanted more than anything else in the world.

Now these three remain: Faith, hope, and love. But the greatest is love.

We did an impossibly hard thing.

Love can do that.

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