Requiem

I hadn’t realized the Gulf Coast gets so steamy hot.  I take off my shoes, sweating and squinting in the sun.  Karl’s pale Nordic skin is getting flushed.  We’re standing at the end of a pier looking out into Lemon Bay, holding between us a shopping bag from Fresh Direct containing four cardboard cartons filled with the crematorium ashes of our parents.  We’ve collected them over the years, one after another.  They are identical, having been produced by the same funeral home back in Vermont, I guess standard issue when you turn down the expensive urns on display.

The oldest carton holds my father-in-law’s ashes from when he shot himself in the head in 1998.  The second oldest is from my mother-in-law who died in a nursing home five years later, so demented and weak she could not raise her head, or smile, or protest.  The third and fourth cartons contain my parents’ ashes.   They quietly passed away in 2007.  My mother was 94 and my father would have turned 100 if he could have stalled death another few months.

The cartons look like takeout boxes from the Chinese restaurant but bigger, white with fold-up tops.  They have never been opened.  The reason is, neither Karl nor I ever had the courage to examine what is inside.  We just collected them and stored each one on a shelf in the garage and when that started to feel disrespectful, we moved them first to the downstairs closet, then to the attic. 

Every so often one of us would say,

“Hey, let’s figure out what to do with all these ashes. 

And the other would agree.  “We should scatter them somewhere.”

That would be end of the discussion for another year, and we would absentmindedly stack things in front of the stored cartons, the better to ignore them, these sacred, repellant remnants of our parents.

Finally, ten years from the last parental death, the need to be done with the cartons outweighs our reluctance to face facts, so on this trip to Florida we pack them in the trunk of the car and swear that if we accomplish nothing else, we will not carry these ashes back home.

Karl picks up one of the cartons at random.  He sets it on the railing and we look down into the murky currents of the bay.  Vague forms of fish swim, fat muddy mullets circling the dock.  We look around nervously, pretty sure you’re not allowed to throw crematorium ashes into the water.  Nobody but us is around.  I feel a sense of urgency to get this done before we get caught.

I open the top of the carton and look in dismay at the contents.  It is full to the brim, heavy.  I  don’t breathe. 

“Oh fuck,” Karl says.  The ashes are not fine.  The cartons are filled with chunks and lumps.  We mistakenly thought you got a handful of  powder, all sifted and clean, not this  great shoveled-up mass of burnt bone. 

I start to feel sick.

I eye Karl sideways and he’s not smiling.  We are both beginning to understand why it took so long, why for years we shuffled these cartons upstairs and downstairs and outside.  Dealing with them is not much fun. We wanted to say a few words, toss the ashes into the air in memory of our folks, but now we are speechless and having trouble remembering anything nice about our parents. 

Mustering my courage, I poke my finger into the open carton but as soon as I touch the contents, I stop, realizing you can’t scatter this stuff, you have to turn the carton upside down using both hands and shake until everything plummets into the water. So that is what we do, one carton at a time, wanting to speed things along but noticing that the ashes unfortunately do not sink immediately but float for a time on the surface, dusty and oily all at once, attracting the attention of the mullets.

For a few minutes we watch the water, looking down between the boards of the dock as the waves gradually break up the scutwork of ash, as the sun beats down on our bare heads, as the cormorants and pelicans dive in the distance, as the mullets splash, and then we gather up the empty cartons, weightless as air.