Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [130]
The day of Wally’s memorial service, his youngest brother Mark carried the brass box containing his ashes home down Commercial Street, a kind of ritual gesture. Sometime during the next few days I put the box into the nightstand beside my bed, with another box in which I’d collect the letters and sympathy cards people sent, copies of the newspaper obituaries. I needed time to come to terms with the ashes. I imagined that in time I’d know where they should go, whether I should scatter or keep them; Wally had been clear that he’d wanted to be cremated, but the conversation had never really gone further than that. His silence made it evident that the nature of the memorial service and the fate of his ashes were up to me.
In a while I knew that I wanted to spread his ashes in the marsh I love, the wild and open place I walk through, winters, out to the point where the seals are. A part of me wanted to hold onto them, too. But when I meditated about the ashes I imagined pristine urns, sealed off from the world—and then, alternately, the play of light on water, the inward and outward rush of tide, the complex symphonic spectrum of life that the marsh is. What, there, is not part of life? That, I knew, was what Wally would want.
Talking to Wally’s mother, I planned to scatter the ashes in the spring, when it would be warm enough for us and whoever else in his family wanted to come to walk out along the dike into the wind-swept field of the marsh. But I could tell she was reluctant, uncertain, even though she agreed. And when the time we’d considered drew close, in May, I offered her an out, saying there really wasn’t any hurry, that we should do this when we’re really ready. Relieved, she said she’d like to wait, and I didn’t know until that moment that I’d be relieved, too. I wasn’t ready to relinquish the evidence of his body.
In a while, I began to forget the ashes were there. And then I’d remember them, and wonder if I was avoiding being aware of their presence.
In the fall, Betty and I talked again, and settled on the anniversary of Wally’s death. It would be a cold walk in January, but something about the turning of a year felt right. Rather like that Jewish ceremony in which the headstone’s unveiled, after the first year, for the family, marker of a year survived, of the actuality of loss.
I’d been tempted, at St. John the Divine, by the walls of little containers bearing the names of the dead, some of them with their small vases, their tokens of remembrance. Wouldn’t it be good to have a place in which Wally was remembered, an inscription of his name?
But those chapels felt, unmistakably, for the living, even the Christmas cards and flowers and love-tokens there. What these ashes wanted, I felt sure, was not containment but participation. Not an enclosure of memory, but the world.
I brought the ashes out of my bedside cabinet, polished the box, set it on the mantel where I could study it. I still held a fear, a doubt about letting the remainder of Wally’s body go. In another box, one I can hardly bear to open, I’ve saved the little personal things that were around his bed: his glasses, the wooden angel from Indonesia, a toy wooden clown he liked, whose tongue popped out when you pressed on his hat. His silver ring’s on my left hand now, pushed against mine. But those accessories, however personal and full of the psychic scent of a man, are not his body. Once I let these ashes go, into their commingling with the world, there was no getting them back.
Relieved to know my back was mending—through whatever agency, Eastern or Western, physiological or medicine of