Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [15]
In fact, the package arrived at the post office on Saturday morning, and the man from the funeral home arrived in my kitchen at ten-thirty, where a host of friends were getting ready for the day. I went by myself into the bedroom, the room where Wally died, with the plastic box and a kitchen knife to break the sealing tape. I sat with the thing on my lap, cut the binding, and slid the brown polymer coffer—coffin?—open. Sealed there in a plastic bag, strangely cold from its journey through the mails, were the remains of my darling: little pearled bits of gravel, almost like ground clay. There was a moment of piercing, utterly abject grief—this is what is left—and I swear it was followed, in less than a minute, by the clearest sense that what I held was inert, only a material, not even alive in the way that clay or soil is. If it was clear that Wally’s body wasn’t him, then it was even more clear that this sack of—what to call it? stone?—was even less so. The funeral directors have a word for this stuff, one of those deeply debased late twentieth-century words which do disservice to what they name, or rather what they avoid. “Cremains,” they call it. It makes me shudder, aesthetically, still, but I admit I understand better the impulse. They may want language to serve to distance us (or them) from the fact of the body’s burned residue, but the plain fact is that there is about the material itself a kind of distance, a lack of relation to what it was.
In the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest poem in the world, there is a heartbreaking declaration of a beloved’s death: “The companion Enkidu is clay.” A beautiful and bitter irony, since the poem which preserves the love of Gilgamesh and Enkidu is itself inscribed on tablets of clay. But clay has so much more soul and presence, such a quality of heaviness and sorrow to it, such a definite scent and taste. In that same poem, clay is described as the food of the unmourned dead; its heaviness and moisture perfectly evoke the humor of grief. But ashes have a kind of anonymity, a quality of no-life which feels, at last, vacant, without essence.
So I wrapped the stuff in a silk Japanese kerchief and placed it in the brass box I’d bought. Which I carried, that afternoon, to the service, and which I think only a few people noticed anyway, in the rush and swell of the speaking and the music, the spinning intensity of the day.
I had thought that the ashes would somehow be the service’s center of gravity; the place where everything deepened, opening into the darkness of grief. But it wasn’t like that; they seemed a sort of afterthought, an extra. When people asked, before that day, what I was going to do with them, I said I’d let them go eventually, scattering them, but in truth I couldn’t really imagine it, couldn’t think I’d ever really be ready. But once I encountered the lifeless sack of what once carried his life, I could think of dispersing them—thought, in fact, that perhaps then they’d be more alive, mingled again with water, soil, and stone, the rising yeasts of the world. They are going, this spring, out to Hatch’s Harbor, where my seal lies, a body resolving even as I write into thousands of things which are not the body—entering into gull and tide and the unseeable tiny lives inside the sand.
I lay my hand on the seal’s back. The spring sun has warmed the fur, which catches the light. I want to caress it; I want to lie down beside it. I am stopped by some nagging sense