The Dock of Theseus at Mary's Cottage: What identity is verse what identity does

The first step of the aluminum ladder wobbles as I descend from the dock and into the cold May morning water of Lake Mitchell in Cadillac, MI. There is one missing bolt on that step, and I note it in my mind with the realization it is one of many small maintenances I have stored away over the weekend. Fin, my one-year-old Golden Retriever, moans from the end of the dock as I walk into deeper waters. At waist depth, I shallow-dive into the lake. I breaststroke in the frigid water, feel the cold sear on my skin, burst through the surface, and gulp thick, cool air. My breathing finds a practiced calm and I sink in, neck deep.

I look out at the lake. The encircling shoreline is green, conifer forest spotted with small cottages. The sky is a gray inkblot of scuttling clouds. The clouds are haloed by the soft red hues of dawn. The lake is quicksilver, and small undulations turn the surface into an oil slick reflection of the sky. Tiny black gnats hover over the surface as if repelled from the dancing lake like the opposing sides of a magnet. I ask God for strength and peace, and I thank Him for those I love. A loon surfaces in the distance. Then another. They sing an eerie song that sounds like mourning and also morning. Fin’s whining joins the melody. I breathe and turn back to the dock.

“Okay, bud, let’s finish up around here.” I say to Fin as I walk back to the dock and ascend the aluminum ladder with the loose step.

We call it Mary’s Cottage, the lake house that sits on a small cut of Lake Mitchell frontage. It was purchased in 1986. For nearly forty summers, my family has gathered here. It is the most consistent location of home that I know.

This May weekend of 2025, I am here with Fin for a few nights. The one aim is to replace the rotten planks of our dock. The dock has twelve sections, ten feet long, each with twenty-one cedar planks. That is 252 planks in all. My Uncle Joe has replaced a quarter of the planks over the twenty-plus years we have owned the dock. Over the weekend, I replaced another quarter. The remaining original pieces show signs of pre-rot and will need replacing soon.

My best estimate is that the entire 252 planks will be replace within five years.

As Fin and I walk down the dock to pack up before leaving, I step across the mismatched planks, the new one’s yellow, unstained, pressure-treated wood, the original, heavy stained cedar, and it strikes me that each year an original piece of this place is replaced with something new.

Theseus Ship is a philosophical paradox that asks the question: once all the pieces of Theseus’s ship are replaced, is it still the original ship, or something else?

I have to wonder about this paradox as I walk up a Theseus-like dock. Across the nearly forty-year run at Lake Mitchell, many of the pieces of the original ship have been replaced.

Fin is a stark example. Watching Fin play on the grassy shore, sniff the water, and leap down to splash and play in the shallow, sandy-bottom lake, I ask myself how many puppies have made that first jump from our seawall. Across my family, there have been many. Fin is the third golden retriever.

The first golden retriever was Logan. We got him for my sixteenth birthday when we were living in a rental house after our house-fire, in which our home of fifteen years burnt to the ground and our prior two dogs, Kelly and Cody, passed in the fire. Fin is a spitting image of Logan. And as I watch him jump and splash, it’s beautiful but it is also a question. Is he just another new dock piece, pressure-treated lumber, replacing the original cedar? My best answer is maybe. It begs many questions of this place...

The original cabin was a two-bedroom hut on a swamp shore. My sister and I shared a bunk room the size of a closet. I was so small then that my memory wants to tell me it was the biggest room I’ve ever been in. In the early nineties, we updated the original cottage with an addition, adding a living room and two bedrooms. We also installed a cement seawall and bought a new pontoon boat. When I say “we” did these things, I mean my family. It was an inside job, done mostly by my uncle, my mom, my dad, and a few friends.

Across three decades, the extensions of my family have been replacing parts, one at a time: roofs, floors, kitchens, boats, furniture, bedding, towels, drywall, furnaces, dishware, décor, card decks, bonfire wood, s'more ingredients, bug spray, and unnamed numbers of lake toys. None of that mentions the generations of kids and pets. In October of 2023, twenty great grandchildren, ten grandchildren, and four children celebrated the 90th birthday of my grandma here. Many new pieces for Mary’s Cottage…

What interests me about the Ship of Theseus is this: it’s a question of identity and the inherent nature of time and change. Why fix the pieces? Why replace them? What is the ship when all the pieces are replaced?

The answers are clear as I walk up the dock after my cold plunge. Beads of cool water roll down my chest. A towel is wrapped at the waist. It collects the moisture. Fin whines and scampers up the dock, his nails chattering on the wood. Under my stride, the dock feels solid. The sways are from the sandy bottom lake. The creaks are of the new wood settling.

We fix the pieces to clarify the form of things; to give structure to the unstructured parts of our life. We fill in the undefined places, the shadows of grief, the unanswered questions of ourselves, and the form of our life is apparent.

But what is the identity when all the pieces are replaced?

A separation is needed here. We must draw the line between what an identity is and what the identity does.

Isn’t that the hang up these days? We like to argue about what the identity is, but we don’t talk about what the identity does.

When all the pieces of Theseus Ship are replaced, it is still a ship. It continues to serve its purpose. This seems like the most powerful answer: we replace the parts to serve the purpose.

Defining an identity is fleeting. It is a series of parts that are always being replaced. Defining what it is does not bring clarity. Clinging to what the identity is will always feel insufficient. But, defining what it does, that moves us forward, it gives us purpose. We should cling to this.  

The purpose of Mary’s cottage is to gather, to grow, to explore, to build skills, and to provide safe harbor for our family. It becomes clear to me that the replacement pieces for this place are also forged here. It is a self-fueling enterprise, as all good things should be, as our identity should be.

We replace and repair the parts of our life. We give ourselves new scaffolding. From it, we rebuild the infrastructure. We operate here and add ornaments and comforts. We call it our life. But what for? What is the purpose? That is worth reflecting on.

You are building and rebuilding your purpose every day. What parts are you replacing? Name them. You’re working on your ship of Theseus so you can carry on. It shepherds you forward. Just like Mary’s Cottage.