GOOD GUY Gone
Patrick Childress was one of the most annoying people I’d ever met. You know the type—the kind of guy who does whatever strikes his fancy as interesting or worthwhile ridiculously, effortlessly well. Building an addition on a house. Shoring up a 27-foot stock production boat and sailing it around the world alone. Not only repairing the blisters on a seriously pocked cruising boat, but also producing an exceptional Youtube video series of professional quality on the project. To top it all off, he was married to a beautiful woman, they’d retired early, and together were in their second decade of wandering around the planet on their own whims and schedule, with no end at all in sight.
Seriously, dudes like that are just hard to take.
All joking aside, it was something Patrick had no control over that did him in: contracting the coronavirus in South Africa this past spring while with his wife, Rebecca, on their Valiant 40, Brick House, and passing away from the insidious, horrible disease in early June. Rebecca caught it too but recovered quickly; unlike her husband, there was no kidney failure, dialysis or ventilator. But she was no less a victim, losing the love of her life and ending up stranded in a strange land.
Today’s reminder that life is not fair.
Like everybody who met him, I felt lucky to know Patrick. He was a seriously good guy. For several years, he was married to then-managing editor of Cruising World, Lynda, whom he met here in Newport, Rhode Island, after beefing up his Catalina 27 for that lap around the planet (a Catalina 27!). During this time, while working locally as a contractor, he knocked off several projects on my old house; to say he was a tad handier than me would be a major understatement.
Patrick’s first marriage didn’t work out, but it set the stage for his second, with Rebecca, which turned into a true, lasting love story. It started, appropriately enough, at sea, when Patrick was skippering a big Swan from Newport to St. Maarten, and Rebecca, thirsty for offshore miles, signed on as crew. In the midst of a 60-knot tempest, something between them clicked. And there were many, many more miles to come.
Lucky Patrick: Rebecca came with that 40-footer called Yellow Rose, her consolation prize at the conclusion of her own first marriage. (“My ex-husband got the appreciating asset—the house—and I got the depreciating one.”) A year after they got together, Patrick bought in to the vessel, and Rose became Brick House.
Soon after, around 2008, they set off to sail the world: the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean. I actually crossed paths with them early in the trip, in Belize. If ever I saw happier, more compatible people, I can’t recall.
They’d made it to Africa, with big plans to cross the South Atlantic and spend a long while exploring Patagonia, when they came down with COVID-19. Rebecca recovered fairly quickly; Patrick did not. Over the course of several weeks, things went from bad to worse. A friend set up a Gofundme page for the couple, which Rebecca updated regularly. (Ultimately, nearly 1,500 people donated to the fund, to the tune of nearly $90,000. It’s the silver lining to this sad tale, being that the entire terrible experience did not leave her in financial ruin.)
On June 8, she was called to the hospital in the early hours and allowed to see Patrick for the first time since he’d been hospitalized. He was in grave condition, very much out of it. Later, Rebecca wrote what is easily the singular saddest thing I’ve ever read:
“In his good ear [I said] I was here and that everything was OK now, he could go and I will catch up with him, and that we would have fun together again someday. He flicked his eyes and looked right into mine, I swear, and a tear came into his left eye, the same eye a tear came into as we were marrying 13 years ago… I will never forget that either.” Twenty minutes later, he was gone.
Whatever one’s take on the virus, believe me when I tell you that it all becomes a lot more real and urgent and awful when it takes out one of your mates. It’s more than a little “annoying.” It’s a goddamned tragedy.