Shark Week! Discovering Secrets of the Deep

It’s Shark Week, and I’m so excited. If you are not familiar with Shark Week, it is the week when the Discovery Channel devotes its prime time shows entirely to sharks. I have been watching Shark Week for over 20 years. Now you are probably thinking, “Wow, she’s really running out of things to write about…” – Stay with me – I promise you that I will get to a point that relates to my life a little more deeply (no pun intended).

When I watch Shark Week, I am reminded how big the world is. So much of the planet is unexplored water that holds complete mysteries. This shows that we are just a small part of the equation, just a tiny little speck in a great big world. Sometimes, my stressors seem too much to bear and my problems suffocate me. I don’t always know how I’m going to pay for my bills, let alone my son Christopher’s medical treatments. He has severe autism and I wonder what will happen to him when I’m not here to take care of him. Sometimes just getting through the day can be a challenge. When I am able to look at the world on a larger scale, these problems seem much smaller.

Since I began watching Shark Week, I’ve seen many new discoveries. When I first started watching, the Great White was king. But scientists then learned that the Bull Shark can be far more aggressive and deadly. The rare Greenland Shark was thought to be a gentle giant, eating mostly dead, rotting carcasses of whales and seals. But when researchers dissected one a few years ago they were surprised when a whole mess of reindeer and polar bear parts came out. They’ve since learned that they are far more common and deadly than they ever thought. It was probably only a decade ago or so that researches first saw Great White Sharks jumping high out of the water (called breaching), gracefully hunting. And the Megamouth Shark was an entirely new type of shark discovered in the 70s and there is still very little known about it.

Great White Shark Breaching (“Cápák a levegőben – Kolosszus nyomáb,” CC BY 2.0, by lwpkommunikacio, modified)

Who knows what else they will find? These discoveries give me so much hope. There is still so much to learn about everything. This includes medical treatments. I will never give up hope on healing Christopher, and new discoveries are being made all the time. Maybe the treatment that unlocks who is trapped inside his impaired body and brain is just around the corner.

Christopher enjoying the beach last summer in Wildwood, New Jersey

I have always found the ocean very peaceful. But, it really is a whole other world, so much of which we know nothing about. This really is a metaphor for Christopher – if you just look at him, he looks like an ordinary child. You wouldn’t know how hard he struggles just to do things that come naturally to everyone else. And I don’t know what is beneath the surface – what he thinks about, how he feels most of the time, what he is afraid of, what he likes. This usually makes me sad, but thinking about it like the ocean reminds me that I can appreciate the beauty and mystery of something without fully understanding it.

Obviously, watching Shark Week is not something that solves my life problems or takes all of my stresses away. It is just a small escape from the sometimes harsh realities of my day-to-day life. But I will never tire of watching these beautiful creatures – majestic, strong, and mysterious – and I am fascinated at how they’ve evolved and adapted over the last 400 million years. No matter what happens, sharks accept. Sharks make it work. They beautifully go with the flow.

Blacktip Reef Sharks