KAILUA-KONA — Sunday will find Susan Wallis standing solitary on a small patch of the Kohala Coast, gazing out at the same restless, indigo waters that 15 years ago swept away from her the only man she’s ever loved. ADVERTISING
KAILUA-KONA — Sunday will find Susan Wallis standing solitary on a small patch of the Kohala Coast, gazing out at the same restless, indigo waters that 15 years ago swept away from her the only man she’s ever loved.
Every year after Ironman comes to a close and the chaos in Kona begins to subside, Susan travels to the spot her husband, Mike, was last seen alive. There, in the lava rock, she fashions his name in white stone or with the vibrant petals of the bougainvillea.
She snaps a few photos before the wind and water wash them away, and remembers. Then she departs back to her home in Florida until the following October, when Ironman rolls back into town and beckons the 64-year-old retired high school teacher back to Hawaii Island.
“I don’t have a grave site to visit (in Florida), and I could set up a memorial or something, but this is here,” Susan said. “The last time I spent with him, our last picture together … this is where my last memories are with him.”
The precise details of Mike’s accident, like his body, were never discovered. A sportsman and a naturalist, Mike was thrilled when his wife qualified for her first Ironman event, which was slated for 2001.
He was happy for her and her accomplishments, Susan said, but equally excited to hunt at Parker Ranch and fish the tarpon known to reside in the deep, chilly waters behind the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority, just a few miles north of Kailua Village.
Mike ventured to the fishing spot in the early morning hours of Oct. 3, a Wednesday, promising his wife he’d rejoin her at noon. When he didn’t return, Susan left a cell phone, a sandwich and a note on the door of their hotel room with a message to call.
She had no inkling that anything was wrong.
“I was kind of mad, believing that he was thinking of himself instead of me and was just spending more time fishing,” Susan remembered. “He’d done that before.”
But when she returned to find Mike absent and the hotel room exactly as she’d left it, a sick and sinking feeling gripped her — one she was unable to shake.
“I went from mad and anxious to feeling like that was it,” Susan said. “A feeling like I’d seen him for the last time.”
The search and rescue team went on the hunt for the next three days, replete with divers, helicopters and investigators combing the shoreline. The search yielded nothing but a tackle box near the couple’s empty rental car and a broken fishing pole on the uneven, slippery rocks that crept out into the sometimes treacherous water.
An employee at the energy lab said he recalled a tall man fishing the area Wednesday morning, but there was no other sign of Susan’s husband of 28 years.
Her inkling became a certainty. Mike was gone.
Susan’s next daunting task was to call home and deliver the news to her children, Christine (Chrissy) and John, who were 21 and 19 years old at the time, respectively.
“The next couple of days I don’t really remember,” said Chrissy, who visited with her father as she slept, waking from dreams and feeling for a fleeting moment that maybe she’d just imagined it all. “It was weird to process. I don’t know what’s worse, knowing (someone you love) is going to die for months or years, or having it happen all of the sudden. You wonder if it would have been easier to deal with.”
For weeks, Mike’s daughter couldn’t walk up the stairs of her family home to enter her father’s room. But two years later, she traveled with Susan back to Hawaii, back to Ironman, where a relationship budded with the setting of their lives’ greatest tragedy that neither mother or daughter can quite explain.
Chrissy recalls becoming infuriated when she first saw the place her father died. A much safer concrete area was located just 50 feet from the spot, and she couldn’t fathom why he hadn’t fished there, where the rogue waves that likely claimed his life would have been rendered considerably less perilous.
“I told her, ‘Because that was your dad,’” Susan said.
Susan, who ran her first Ironman three days after Mike’s passing, has returned to participate in the triathlon eight more times. On five other occasions, she’s worked the event as a volunteer, opting to avoid Kailua-Kona only in early October of 2002, the year following Mike’s disappearance.
“I wasn’t upset with her at all for racing,” Chrissy said. “That’s just kind of how she is. She’s very stoic. That was really her way of coping, and I think that’s what she thought my dad would have wanted her to do.”
Susan’s subsequent trips to Hawaii Island have proved cathartic, helping occupy a vacant space in her life she’s chosen not to fill with another person. She lost the love of her life, her high school sweetheart, the year they both turned 49.
She said she’s tried dating, but it just didn’t feel right.
“He was my person,” Susan said. “And I’m happy with where I am now. It feels good to share this, too. I’ve told my story a lot, and it’s a sad story, but it happens to other people, so I don’t feel like I’m special. I just have my little cross to bear.”
Chrissy has traveled to the islands on five occasions, typically ending her trips with a stint in West Hawaii. She was married on Kauai, the same place she spent both her first and second wedding anniversaries and the island on which she hopes to someday make her home.
Though Chrissy can’t put words to it, she and Susan share a communion with Hawaii that creates a pull neither can deny.
“I think it would almost be surprising if my mom didn’t want to go back, and I don’t know exactly why,” Chrissy said. “You feel very close to him being there. Something about being there just feels like being complete.
“I don’t know what it is.”
