Jean-Michel Cousteau - My Father, the Captain: My Life With Jacques Cousteau

T WO S ALUTES

J une 30, 1997. It is a day of sadness and ceremony, of celebration and deep affection. For me, there is also curiosity and wonder. I am standing in the first pew, in front of a coffin draped by the French flag. Next to me is my fathers widow, dressed in black. She is flanked by her two childrenmy half siblings. For the longest time, we did not know each other. Indeed, we hardly knew of each other. Together, we look nothing like the family portrait I have carried in my head for the past 59 years. That picture should include my younger brother, Philippe, dead now for 18 years, and my beloved mother, Simone Melchior Cousteau, gone as well for nearly seven years.

This picture? Well, it is an image no one in my immediate family could have envisionedand yet, because we are assembled here for my fathers funeral, it is the one that we now have to consider. It is here before us, and we are in its middle; and I am afraid that it is an image that will endure. I can close my eyes and imagine another more intimate portrait, but eventually this one will push its way into my thinking. Even a man who built his life around the power and majesty of moving pictures must leave this world with a freeze-frame memory; and so, like it or not, this will be my fathers legacy.

Jacques Chirac, the President of the French Republic, graces the magnificent cathedral and honors my fathers memory with his presence. He sits alone, at the front of the church. Behind President Chirac sit prominent mourners from the disparate worlds of politics, culture, arts, and sciences. Such was the breadth of my fathers life that it reached into so many different corners, touched so many different peoplemany I only know by reputation or by their pictures in the newspaper. My fathers peers of the French Academy are also present: Hlne Carrre dEncausse, Alain Decaux, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, and many others. There are ministers, too: Dominique Voynet of the Environment; Louis Le Pensec of Agriculture and Fishing. Next to them sit the mayor of Paris and his wife, the chief of the Paris police, the chief of police of the Ile-de-France region, and on and on.

It is a grand and fitting assemblage, but beneath the homilies and stirring tributes, I am moved to consider my fathers place in this hallowed hall. He was not the most religious of men. He was born into a traditional Catholic family, but my paternal grandparents were not particularly religious. That said, this is a funeral, a memorial, and so I do not give the question of my fathers faith a second thought.

A large crowd is gathered on the steps outside the cathedralpeople of all ages, all classes, all endeavors. Through my fathers work and passion, they discovered an amazing new world, a place of wonder and beauty that had been out of reach until he found a way to film it and bring it into their homes. Through his eyes, through the testimony of his camera, through his clever inventions and innovations, the sea has become magically alive for these people, and they are here to show their gratitude. That is how I have come to see it. They are here, some of them, donning red woolen caps of the sort my father had famously worn on his expeditions. They are here because, at one time or another, my fatherknown by the familiar nickname of JYC to friends and family, blending the initials for Jacques-Yves Cousteau in such a way that it came out sounding like Jeekhad helped to lift them from their troubles and set them down in a place of mystery, tranquility, hope, and wonder. They are here because he had stirred their adventurous spirit.

I am following the funeral procession, but the sound of the cathedrals big organ draws me back to thoughts of my father. I hear him in the solemn music. I see him in the eyes of the other mourners, many of whom I have never met. He was a man who kept his distance, who had been authoritarian by choice, who was not always warm to even his closest friends and associates. He was a man who believed in efficiency above all. He was a man who would not be denied. But alongside all of this, he was also a man with an undeniable charisma, a man who always achieved his goalsand, primarily, a man of such single-minded determination that he would not give up on a goal until he had achieved it. He dreamed big, and he lived even bigger, if such a thing is possible. He was transportedtransformedby his lifes work and so, too, were those who were carried along in his marvelous wake. He sought joy, release, freedom, and wonder. He made his living from these emotions and delivered them in return.