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November 6, 2009

A memory worth preserving

Susan Flynn

In the summer of 1969, Cheryl Dyment nearly drowned while swimming at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester. The 19-year-old was splashing in the waves with a friend when a riptide pulled her out to sea.

She watched grown men next to her scream for help as they were pulled away from shore. She heard the cries of her friend, trapped in water no deeper than her knees. She started to panic herself, as her arms and legs failed to move her anywhere but out.

Forty years later, Dyment's interpretation of her near-death experience is on display in a series of paintings on exhibit at a Boston gallery. But instead of chaos and fear, her paintings depict beauty and serenity. That's because as the riptide pulled her out, she remembered a lesson from swimming class.

"Lie on your back and float," Dyment says.

She relaxed. She remembered a calmness coming over her, as the currents carried her out so far she could no longer see shore. The sun was bright, and the blue water and sky sparkled all around her. She felt one with the ocean.

"It was like being in a sea of diamonds," the Middleton woman says. "It was beautiful."

A reception for her exhibit, "The Importance of Floating ... and Other Lessons," was held last night. The friend with her in Gloucester that near-tragic day and her sister, who was only 10 at the time, made the trip into Boston.

When Dyment's sister, Beverly, first saw the paintings, she cried, some four decades later. She remembers standing on the beach screaming, certain she had lost her big sister for good. She says she would paint an entirely different scene, one with people lined on the beach in complete chaos, more reds and blacks than blues and whites.

Dyment does not know how long she was in the ocean. A lifeguard eventually came and swam her back to a rope tow that pulled them to shore. She collapsed when she reached the sand.

Later she remembers laughing about the ordeal on the way home to Melrose. That night, though, she shot up out of bed, struck by how close she came to death. A newspaper story the next day reported that five people were rescued and one person had died from a heart attack.

Dyment, now 59, is a newcomer to painting. At the age of 50, with her children grown, she did some soul searching, knowing she did not want to return to her old career of human resources.

"I gave myself the luxury of thinking who I was and what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life," she says.

The answer was to paint.

This was not a hobby for Dyment; this was a calling.

Four years ago, she moved from her longtime home of Danvers to Middleton because she wanted a studio. She would hunt for houses with her husband with a compass in her hand to be assured the light would be good for painting.

Dyment loves to draw outdoors and ironically still finds the pull of the ocean hard to resist. It's the one place she can go, she says, where she feels like she can truly breathe.

The process of painting her near-drowning 40 years ago has reminded her of something important. Floating may have saved her life that day, but it's also a valuable technique to use even out of the water.

"In life, we can panic and we can fight," Dyment says, "or we can float and go with the tragedy thrown at us."

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"The Importance of Floating ... and Other Lessons" will be on exhibit at Gallery 1581 on Beacon Street in Brookline until Jan. 9.

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Staff writer Susan Flynn can be reached at sflynn@salemnews.com or by calling 978-338-2658.

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