She began by showing me pictures of her daughter. Christine Grinavic is a striking young woman, a tall outdoorsy blonde. She is a sailor, a writer, and, at age 27, quite a traveler, having visited 19 countries. She started college in the Midwest and finished at URI. Her half-serious dream is to open a coffee bar in the Caribbean. She has long loved iced coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts and thinks they need a place that serves something just as good in St. Thomas.

I use the present tense in referring to Christine because I suppose that’s what you do in a case like this. A year ago May 7, the private sailboat she was helping deliver from the Caribbean to Annapolis disappeared in a storm. No sign of it has been found. They say seas were as high as 40 feet. There were three other souls aboard with Rhode Island connections.

I was hearing about this in the Cumberland home of Christine’s mom, Mary Grinavic. She is 53 and principal of the Elm Street Elementary School in Walpole. Christine is her only child.

“Not a trace,” Mary said. “Not a life jacket, not a scrap of wood. The theory is that a rogue wave slam-dunked them to the bottom of the ocean.”

It was a 56-foot sailing vessel name Flying Colours. It had a seasoned captain, Patrick “Trey” Topping III, 39, of Newport. Aside from Christine, it was crewed by Jason Franks, 34, who has family in North Kingstown, and Rhiannon Borisoff, 22, who’d come from Oregon to the Newport sailing community. Franks was a captain, too, and both women seasoned sailors.

On their way to Maryland, they got overtaken by tropical storm Andrea about 160 miles off the North Carolina coast. Last May 7, the boat’s emergency radio beacon registered at 3:30 a.m. It stopped signaling four hours later. The Coast Guard rescued crew from three other boats caught in Andrea. For six days, planes searched a part of the ocean the size of Texas for the Flying Colours, and since, passing boats in the tight-knit sailing community have kept an eye out for clues.

For weeks, and even months, families held out hope that perhaps the boat’s mast was down, and the crew would somehow endure.

But in eight days, it will be a year. At that point, Mary Grinavic told me, a certificate of presumed death at sea can be issued. Perhaps, she said, she could have sought one before then, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. On May 7, at 7 a.m., she will hold a memorial Mass for Christine at St. John Vianney Church in Cumberland, at last acknowledging that her daughter is gone.

She had written me an e-mail mentioning the one-year anniversary. In it, she made a simple request: “Please take a moment to learn a little more about Christine.”

So this is not meant to be an overview of a tragedy at sea as much as an introduction to one exceptional woman who is technically still considered with us. Mary pointed out that the others were exceptional, too, but I thought I would tell one story as a way to reflect them all.

I asked Mary if she planned any gestures besides the memorial service.

“My counselor suggested I write a goodbye letter to her and send it overboard,” she said. “Though she’d hate it if I littered.”

Growing up in Cumberland, Christine was a tomboy, one of few girls playing in the town Little League. I asked Mary what her daughter’s position was.

“She played first base, second base, one of the bases,” said Mary, adding that Christine would rib her about her poor grasp of sports. Mary would tell her daughter the Red Sox scored a point, prompting Christine to roll her eyes and say, “Mom, it’s called a run.”

During high school summers, Christine worked for the Pawtucket Red Sox.

“She started in the hot dog stands when she was 15,” said Mary. “She was a sweepee — you go around with a stick and pick up trash.” She liked it because it gave her a good view of the game. She also sold tickets and helped with team travel arrangements.

A few years ago, Christine had a bit of a moral crisis when she signed on as a paid participant in a sleep study with a local hospital. As part of it, she promised to be in bed by 11 p.m. each night with monitoring gear on. But the study took place during the 2004 Red Sox-Yankees pennant series, and the games were running after 11. She could have fudged it and gone to bed past the deadline, but Christine wasn’t like that.

“She told the sleep people she couldn’t meet the requirements, gave up the money and watched the Sox,” said Mary.

Christine hated two things above all others, the Yankees and negativity. If people were downbeat, she’d call them “Gloomy Gus,” or “Bitter Betty” — including her mom sometimes to snap her out of a mood. She loved A Christmas Carol, at Trinity Rep, and saw it each of her last 10 years, even if it meant coming home from faraway trips.

Part of what intrigued me about Christine is that she was a freelance writer with some success at an early age. She sold several essays to The Providence Journal, one based on a visit to the Church of the Nativity in Israel while there on a school-sponsored dig. She went to Macalester College in Minnesota and majored for a time in archaeology. She later wrote about that visit after gunmen had turned Manger Square into a battle zone. Here’s one sentence from her published essay:

“I don’t care about foreign policies or talks or campaigns, because all I know is what the sunlight looks like gleaming off the white walls of Bethlehem, and those walls shouldn’t be sprayed with bullets and stained with death. No walls should be.”

She went to Israel twice on six-week summer digs near the Lebanese border. She was brought up Catholic but learned fluent Hebrew, an unusual achievement, her mom would observe, for an Irish-Lithuanian girl from Cumberland. She swam in the Dead Sea, and lived on a kibbutz, also near the hostile northern border. When her mom said it concerned her, Christine told her, “Oh, don’t worry, there’s a bomb shelter.”

Christine would half-joke that the hardest thing about going to Macalester was that there were no Dunkin’ Donuts nearby. Once, when her mom visited, they looked it up online and saw that the closest one was 20 miles away. The two decided to take a trip there anyway for familiar coffee.

She left Macalester her junior year to study English at URI, but Christine didn’t like being boxed in by a campus. In 2003, she studied abroad in New Zealand, taking side-trips to do things like ice-caving.

URI is where Christine discovered her love of sailing, even taking a course in it for credit. Not long after graduating, upon finding that a cubicle job in Bridgewater didn’t suit her, she became a professional sailor. She found work as a crew member on the Arabella, a three-masted schooner based summers in Newport and winters in St. Thomas. It has 20 cabins and takes passengers on five-day cruises.

Christine began aboard as a stewardess, cleaning cabins and bathrooms, living in the schooner’s tight crew quarters. She developed good sea legs and once sent her mom pictures of herself during a rocky outing standing at extreme angles. Since they had to pack off trash, she learned to crush every water bottle to the smallest size, and, thereafter, had a thing about litter.

She moved up to deckhand, and was licensed to take the helm of the Arabella’s launch. She and other crew members got an apartment in Newport. She loved her job, and assured her mom it even had health insurance. She would walk to work, hang out at the Wharf Deli Pub, and buy cookies at The Cookie Jar near the waterfront. That was in 2005. Christine, 25 at the time, called it, “The best summer ever.”

She still took exotic trips, at one point hiking up Machu Picchu. Mary found it amusing to see Christine turn into such an adventurer.

“When she was 4 or 5,” said Mary, “she was the shiest, quietest, most timid kid. She would cling to me. They had to pry her off me to go to school.”

But now she was doing “the delivery,” crewing on the Arabella at season’s end as it sailed nonstop from Newport to St. Thomas. Christine would sometimes be in full foul-weather gear, and even tethered so if she went overboard, she could be pulled back up.

Mary told Christine that worried her.

Christine said, “You’re acting like such a mom.”

“I am a mom,” Mary said.

At which point Christine, who is 5-foot-10, would pat her much shorter mother on the head.

Once, she sent her mom a conch shell for her birthday. Christine thought the gift was a token gesture, conchs being so common in her world, and free, but Mary treasured it, and afterwards, conch shells became a bit of a symbol in the family.

Last spring, as she finished another winter in St. Thomas, Christine was supposed to help deliver the Arabella back to Newport, but got an offer from a friend who captained the Flying Colours. Could she crew on that boat’s trip up to Annapolis? The trip made more sense to her. She’d be able to visit good friends in Baltimore, and, since it was leaving earlier than the Arabella, be home in Cumberland on Mother’s Day. That was important because Mary’s own mom had just died at age 85.

The Flying Colours left last April 30. There isn’t cell-phone service out in the ocean, so Christine made a final call to her parents that day.

“We’re leaving in about an hour,” she said. “I’m really excited, it should be fun.”

“Okay honey,” said Mary. “Good luck, have a safe trip. I love you.”

“Bye mom.”

A week into the trip, Mary’s husband Jim said the news was reporting a violent storm closing in on their daughter’s route.

On May 8, they were told the Flying Colours was missing.

The Newport sailing community held several gatherings to keep up spirits. But weeks went by with nothing found. The toll was heavy on Christine’s father, a Nextel worker who was on disability due to diabetes and a pacemaker. Five weeks after their daughter’s boat disappeared, he died of a heart attack.

Mary is still in touch from time to time with the families of the others who were lost. They are discussing a remembrance service for them this summer. They want to call it a “Celebration of Life.” They also hope to put a bench with the names of the missing sailors in Newport, perhaps at Brenton Point, or Fort Adams, or another spot tied to the sea.

Mindful that the Rhode Island Foundation funded Christine’s second archaeological trip to Israel, Mary has started a grant program there for college students to explore the world, as her daughter did. It’s called the “Christine T. Grinavic Adventurer’s Fund.”

I thanked Mary for letting me meet Christine.

That was last week.

By now, Mary is in St. Thomas. She flew down on Sunday with plans to board the Arabella on a cruise. She will bring with her a letter to Christine she wants to deliver into the sea. She is mindful that her daughter is against littering, so she doubts she will use a bottle.

Perhaps she will put it into a conch shell.

mpatinkin@projo.com