Mo’orea, French Polynesia
Today
I told myself I wouldn’t cry. I’ve had a lifetime to prepare for this moment. So I supposed that imagining it might take the sting out of the reality. But it’s only served to enhance it.
Before we graduated in Miami, Pan Am had us fill out all our proper legal paperwork. Wills, medical directives, funeral plans. I didn’t want to think about any of those things. It felt like we were tempting fate. But they would not let us graduate without it, and you calmed my nerves, assuring me that it was a gift to our families to communicate our wishes so that they didn’t have to guess at what we would have wanted. You surprised me by choosing to have your remains stored in an urn rather than buried underground. I’d never known anyone who made that choice.
But you, Beverly, always made decisions that went against the grain, and I loved you for it. Your life was too brief, but it was fuller than anyone I’d met before and since, and it has influenced me in a thousand different ways as I got to live all the years that you didn’t.
I open my bag and pull out the alabaster vase you bought on our jaunt to Cairo. It seemed the appropriate choice. You haggled for it in a dusty roadside market as if your very life depended on getting a deal. Not because it was expensive or because you couldn’t afford it, but because you craved the challenge. And after you’d won the back-and-forth, the gleam in your eye mellowed, and you gave the man his original asking price after all.
It’s one of my favorite memories of you, and one that I told at your funeral. Because it described you precisely: competitive and compassionate.
They are not mutually exclusive traits. As you proved again and again.
I remove the silicone wrap that I’d put on the top of the vase. As unceremonious as it is practical. A breeze blows by, swishing the palm leaves that are shading me. I quickly put my hand on top of the vase so that the wind doesn’t take you before I’m ready.
But I’ll never be ready. It’s the one thing I’ve procrastinated about in a lifetime where I’ve been known as punctual and efficient.
It’s now or never.
I sprinkle a few of your ashes into my tremoring hand.
“ You were gone just as you were starting your new life. ”
I blow the ashes onto the sand as if they were the white fluff of a wishing flower.
I sprinkle more. There is less of a tremor.
“ You left behind a family who loved you. Who was just getting to know you. ”
This time, I aim for the water.
I pour the remaining bits into my palm and set the vase down near a coconut. I bring my other hand to join the first, cradling you.
I hang my head and feel the cry start in the pit of my stomach, crawling up my chest, making my shoulders quake, and letting out a sob that sends a group of birds flying off in fear.
Sometimes the most painful memories feel like they’d happened only yesterday.