Mo’orea, French Polynesia
Today
The sun casts its rays over the Pacific waters through a lone cloud, dispersing them in a fan-shaped pattern that reminds me of old paintings where God was depicted in such a scene. The trade winds have picked up early, creating rolling waves of whitecaps far into the horizon, contrasting with waters that variegate between turquoise and deep blue depending on the depth of the ocean floor.
I stretch my legs—my skin wrinkled and spotted—across the sand and let the warmth wash over me. It is an elixir. Like many my age, I live in Florida to escape winters farther north. But unlike those my age, who sink into the ease of golf carts and bridge games, I enjoy the bustling city of Miami.
It is a setting more suited to the young, but once upon a time, it was the beginning of my new life. So it’s the place where I want to spend my remaining years, holding off the reaper by daily walks on the beach and abundant doses of sunshine.
It is where I trained with Pan Am and my life changed for the better and taught me to look ahead, not back.
Once the obituaries of friends became regular occurrences in the newspaper, when my grandchildren became occupied with their own children, when death robbed me of my spouse, I returned to the city where it all began.
You and I had met earlier, of course, in New York. But I don’t count that. It was brief and impersonal.
A long, lean shadow falls across me, and I look up expecting to see a figure equal to its size. Instead, I discover a small girl, maybe six years old, standing in just the right spot for the sun to hint at the woman she will become.
“ Qu’est-ce que c’est? ” she asks.
What is that, it means. I understand her perfectly.
How do I condense my thoughts into an answer that a child will understand?
I respond to her in the language of the once-French island, though I have been out of practice in its use for a very long time.
“C’est un vase,” I respond. The word vase is thankfully similar to its counterpart when spoken.
“The ashes of my friend are in here.” I continue in French. It is mostly the truth, but my rusty words limit me from telling the entirety of the story.
I wonder if she will understand, but a look beyond her years comes over her face, as if this is not an unfamiliar custom to her.
“Someone you loved?” she asks.
“ Someone I loved very much. ”
“How did it happen?” I am surprised that she asks this. It would be natural to assume, looking at my wrinkles and the many liver spots that my great-grandchildren love to connect with marker pens, that my friend was similarly old. I do not explain that you were taken in your prime. That this delay in the return to Mo’orea falls entirely on my shoulders.
“ It was an accident,” I begin. “In the sky. ”
“ In an airplane? ”
I have underestimated the child. The primitive surroundings do not mean that she is unfamiliar with the world.
Tears form in my eyes, fresh as the day I heard the news.
I can only nod.