A new start after 60: I jumped in the sea for the first time, and finally began to heal | Life and style
WWhen David Warr was 11, he thought he was dying. During his swimming lesson at school, he jumped and swam, then realized to his horror that his feet weren’t touching the bottom. He remembers his teacher standing at the edge of the pool yelling at him to “swim” and his own immobilizing fear. “I said to myself, ‘I can’t. I don’t know what to do.’ I started to panic hard. I thought, ‘She’s going to let me die.’
Warr, 61, blocked the way he reached safety, but for five decades he refused to emerge from its depths again. He lives on the island of Jersey where water is a part of life – but even when his sons were little, he only waded a little and watched them swim with envy and pride. On the other hand, he had the feeling of “fighting against water”.
Warr runs a tea and coffee business and also works as a politician; he is deputy for the district of St Hélier Sud. He doesn’t go on vacation often, but last year he and his wife visited Norway and stayed in a lakeside hotel. The water was murky and dark. There were no shallows. Warr’s wife swam; he dipped in a toe. “I said to myself, ‘I’m not going into this. I don’t have confidence in myself.'”
A few days later, they passed a long zip line. Warr plays tennis and stays fit, and “the feeling of keeping age at bay is strong” for him. “I have this thing in me that if there’s an inadequacy, I want to overcome it.” Warr went on the zipline and when he and his wife returned to Jersey, he asked his boys’ former swimming teacher, Sally Minty-Gravett., for classes. She had swum across the English Channel several times, so she knew what she was doing.
They met at the foot of a slipway. Warr put on glasses and a hat. “All the equipment, and no idea.” In the first lesson, he practiced floating. After a few sessions, he became more confident, but he still couldn’t come out of his depths.
When Minty-Gravett asked him to jump from the slipway into the depths, it was “the scariest moment…Here I am – you can kill me now, sort of,” he said.
“Sally said, ‘David, why are you so worried about being overwhelmed? Maybe you should lie down on a couch with someone and talk it out.'”
Warr grew up in Kilkenny, Ireland. But at age 11, he moved with his father and brother to England. “Unfortunately, my mother passed away,” he said. The pool incident happened shortly after, at his new school. Shortly after, he was transferred to a boarding school – “basically, he was ostracized somewhere.”
The subject of his mother’s death was never brought up, until he caught chicken pox and “chatted with the school nurse.” When he told her about his mother, “she was absolutely shocked.” But there was no grief counseling. “I internalized things, then explained them to myself.”
“I think it’s something I have to deal with myself. I can’t explain my fear to anyone else,” he told Minty-Gravett. He jumped into the deep water. “And I bounced back to the surface and gave it a little kick and thought, ‘Now what? » » Minty-Gravett reminded him to float. That if he couldn’t swim, he could float. “And then I managed to slip along the slipway.”
“Sally’s comment was: ‘David, the sea is not trying to kill you. Let the water support you… It holds you, it embraces you.” I had never thought of this concept.
Warr has learned that he doesn’t need to feel the ground beneath his feet to feel safe. “No matter how scared you are, losing your mother at a young age is devastating. Nothing else is ever as traumatic.”
Warr has since swum to a boat, accompanied by Minty-Gravett, and ran laps in the local swimming pool. While swimming, he saw the sunrise and his island from a different perspective. He saw fishermen on small boats returning with their catches and wild swimmers. “There are people who leave their homes and jump straight into the sea.” He found “a new connection” with home. The coastline, he says, “is teeming with life.”
