Much has happened since that winter’s day when Jim and Tenacious did not come home, the day that changed the lives of this family forever. Friends, family, colleagues, and professional groups intensively and methodically searched for Jim above water for almost three weeks. The Coast Guard initiated an immediate, excellent, and comprehensive search for him. I cannot thank the Coast Guard enough for its ongoing efforts to try and find Jim and Tenacious, and for the comfort they offered me, especially during that first long night—the night only a few of us knew Jim was missing, the night when we still had high hopes that he was just overdue. The Coast Guard’s professional search was complemented by the Friends of Jim search, which Mike Olson succinctly and eloquently summarizes in his article titled “The Amateur Search.” Mike acknowledges the extended amateur search team and identifies some of the key players; I would also like to acknowledge the tremendous effort Mike made in helping us with many aspects of the search and its aftermath. I wish to reiterate our family’s gratefulness to all of the searchers, some of whom I worked with closely (those experiences are diamond-etched in my mind forever) and some of whom I have never met. I don’t know the names of the many people who reviewed the Amazon Turk satellite tiles, but to every single searcher I wish to say: your actions are such a positive offset to the loss of Jim. You worked so hard to find Jim. We will always remember the goodness of what you did. Jim was a very lucky man, and we are a very fortunate family, to have so many people care enough to search so hard for him.
When we couldn’t find Jim above water, we searched the seafloor for 3½ months. The underwater search is chronicled in the article written by Ed Saade: “Search Survey for S/V Tenacious: Gulf of Farallones and Approaches to San Francisco.” I wish to thank Ed and his team of professionals for the high quality and thoroughness of their search, and for the kindness and grace they extended to me during the search. I also wish to thank Bob Bilger (an independent marine search expert) for his dedicated effort to locate Tenacious. To the many others who helped with the underwater search, I extend the deeply felt thanks of the family. Most of all, I want to thank Paula Hawthorn for all the help and comfort she has offered during this past year, and especially for staying with me during the whole course of the underwater search. Paula, I think Jim would say that I owe you about a zillion bottles of Ridge Zinfandel (and I’m working on that). But mostly, I want you to know what a positive difference you made, as you freely partook of this journey through the slow-moving, distorted time warp of searching under water.
Dr. Pauline Boss, an expert on ambiguous loss, indicates that it is the loved ones left behind who can become adrift when “a death requires a presumption” (see Silberman, S. 2007. “Where is Jim Gray?” Wired Magazine 15(08): 155). Pauline writes of the nature and consequences of Jim’s ambiguous loss in her article, “A Tribute Not a Memorial: Understanding Ambiguous Loss.” Certainly the months immediately following the end of the underwater search felt like No Man’s Land to me. When we couldn’t find Jim above or below water (and, yes, the Pacific is a rather large and wild ocean), when the underwater search ended on May 31, 2007, it was a very sad day, for we had by then lost two opposing hopes. We had first hoped to find Jim alive during the above-water search. Failing that, we hoped to find out what had happened to Jim by searching the seafloor
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