She did not have a body to bury. She did not have a last moment she could remember, because she was unconscious when he went into the water. She had his harness, dangling. She had his shirts, which she wrapped around a pillow. She had the place on deck where he had been standing.
Grief without a body is a specific kind of grief. The normal rituals of mourning — the funeral, the burial, the physical gathering of people around the material fact of a death — were unavailable to her, first because she was at sea alone and later because there was no body to gather around. Richard Sharp was declared dead by absence, by the evidence of the harness and the passing of time. His death was real but not physically confirmed in the way that most deaths are confirmed.
The engagement ring she tied to a rose and set adrift was the funeral she could make. It was a ceremony she performed alone, with no audience, in the specific vocabulary of the sea: returning something to the water that the water had taken.
The memoir *Red Sky in Mourning* — the title’s red morning sky as sailor’s warning — is the fuller funeral: a testimony to what happened, to who Richard Sharp was, to what his loss meant and cost. Writing it was not simple, given the head injury that complicated her relationship with written language for years. That she wrote it at all is evidence of the same refusal to give up that brought her to Hilo.