A Message in a Bottle Has a Profound Ending .. Ever Searching!

This adventure begins one spring day in 2002 when a French woman whose name we may never know, stood on a ferry crossing the chanel and threw a bundle of clothes into the sea. She next threw in some lilies and a bottle in the shape of a teardrop. The clothes had belonged to her son, Maurice, who had died at the age of 13, and the bottle held her letter to the boy "that no wind … no storm … not even death could ever destroy".

Parts of the letter said, "Forgive me for being so angry at your disappearance," the letter went on, "I still think there's been some mistake, and I keep waiting for God to fix it. “ Forgive me for not having known how to protect you from death. Forgive me for not having been able to find the words at that terrible moment when you slipped through my fingers … "

Once the bottle vanished, the ship docked, the mourning mother went home to get on with her life. She never dreamed the letter would reach shore, let alone that someone would read it.

 This is the actual bottle.

 Karen Liebreich, a London-based author, did just that a few weeks later. The bottle had washed up on a beach in Kent, where it caught the eye of her friend who was walking dogs. They opened up the bottle to find a thin scroll tied with a ribbon and enclosing a lock of hair.

As far as she could tell, the boy had died early one summer, probably by drowning. "For a long time," his mother wrote, "he travelled between two waters, between two lights, trying tirelessly to use up the strength in his outstretched arms. He submitted to the silence, the terrors and the cold … "

She had, of course, been devastated – "My life started when he was born, and I thought it was over when he left me" – and for a while the author reading this note was afraid she might be reading a suicide note. But no, the woman was ready to move on. "While God gives me life," she wrote, "I promise you to live it to the full, to savour each instant in richness and serenity. I know that we will find one another, when the time comes."

 As she read on Liebreich found herself crying. "I'm not a weepy person," she says, "but the letter was very beautiful and very moving."

Liebreich couldn't sleep that night. In the days that followed, she found herself resigned to find her. She wanted to know how Maurice had died; wanted to know what his mother was like; wanted to know if there was a way to track the origin of an unsigned letter in a bottle. Could she reassure herself that the grieving mother was all right.

Did the woman want to be found? Wouldn't that just rake up all that pain again? However, sending a letter in a bottle invites a stranger to pick it up and read it, so I wonder if the mother knew what she wanted when she launched the bottle. Regardless, she needed to tell the tale of her love for her son, the knowledge of his death and her despair.

Over the next few years, Liebreich consulted newspapers, bottle-makers, sailors, doctors, graphologists, psychologists, psychotherapists, secret servicemen, literature professors, forensic scientists, private detectives, even clairvoyants and tarot readers. "The letter would not leave me in peace," Liebreich writes. "But each time I considered giving up I thought I would make one more effort – one more email, one more phone call, one more visit to the library. The answer might be round the next corner."

After three years, Liebreich decided enough was enough. If she couldn't find Maurice's mother, she could at least write about the search. "If, somewhere, the letter-writer is alive," her book concludes, "then perhaps this book can serve as a clumsy 'letter-in-a-bottle' reply … I wonder if she will receive my message."

She did. In 2009, three years after the book came out in Britain, the nameless "she" got in touch to say she felt violated. As she put it, it was as though her story, her suffering, her very intimate being no longer belonged to her.

Largely, it seems, about the many things Liebreich and her helpers had got wrong. Maurice had not drowned, but been knocked off his bicycle. He had died in 1981, 21 years before the letter was written, not just a few.

But what about Liebreich's own belief that the writer wanted to be found? "It never occurred to me that anyone would find my letter in the bottle," the woman explained. "I thought it would smash in the waves and the fragments of glass and paper would gently disperse through the oceans. I gave it to the sea, to the universe: it was perhaps my way of talking to God."

 Maurice's mother, who Liebreich has promised never to name, seems to have forgiven the author for reopening old wounds. She felt it was done sensitively and that was a great relief.  

Re-posted - (8/6/2018)