Two September 1996 #2
“Thank you. That means a lot.” It did and I meant it. I know those are things people say in moments like this, but it was what I needed to hear. Someone remembered her.
“When you’re ready, we can have her transferred over to the funeral home.
But please, take your time.” She turned and left, closing the heavy door behind her, leaving me alone with my Kiju for the last time.
I bent and laid my head down on her chest; the silence of it was somehow comforting. Everything about her was at rest.
“Kesalul, Kiju,” I whispered, and put her hand back under the blanket before leaving. “Nmultes.”
I paid for a room at the motel that sat alongside the highway, a long building with twenty separate doors to twenty separate rooms where I assumed people with no other choice slept in old beds with springs that poked the back, water of a questionable colour and the smell of cigarette smoke that seemed to be embedded into the walls.
I placed a long-distance call. The phone rang five or six times, and I was about to hang up when Sally answered.
“Hello?” She strung out her o, sounding playful and happy, and I felt bad at having to be the one to ruin her good mood.
“Hi, Sally, it’s Aliet.”
“Oh, my goodness. How are you? We’ve missed you. You haven’t been down for a visit in over a year.”
I started to cry immediately. I’d been so good at holding it in since getting out of the car at the hospital parking lot, but hearing Sally’s voice brought the loss close again.
“Oh no, what’s wrong? Aliet? Is it Kiju?”
I wiped my nose on my sleeve and took a deep breath to try to strengthen myself for the words I needed to say.
“Sally, she’s gone. This morning. Heart attack in the garden.” It came out quick, my words a jumble I hoped she would understand.
“Oh love. I’m so sorry. We are on our way. Ben’s out in the woods, but as soon as he gets back, we’ll be down. Are you at the house?”
“No, the motel, the one along the highway. I couldn’t stay at the house without her.”
“Okay then, we will see you soon. We love you, girl.”
She still called me girl even though I was approaching mid-life.
I was sitting in a lawn chair on the cement slab outside the door of my motel room when they pulled in. I looked in the back of their car but there were no children, forgetting that they weren’t children anymore and were busy living lives of their own. Even Faye, the baby, was in her twenties now.
“Aliet.” Sally wrapped herself around me, smothering me in the bulk of her jacket. It was nice to be mothered this way. I stayed until she let go. “So good to see you. Even under the circumstances.”
Ben came around the side of the truck and did the same. I disappeared into his arms.
He’d claim you. I could hear Kiju’s voice.
“My girl.” Ben pulled away and looked at me, his eyes on my eyes. “She was a good woman, had a good life and raised a good girl. It’s okay for her to rest now. I like to imagine her and Maggie together again, drinking tea and laughing on the other side.”
“I know,” I stammered. I turned and walked back to my chair, lifted my glass and drank.
Sally and Ben unpacked and then joined me, Ben with a flask of rye and a diet Pepsi, Sally with an apple juice, me with a glass of red wine.
We raided the vending machine for dinner—chips and chocolate.
We spent the evening that way, sometimes quiet, sometimes in conversation, watching the cars drive past on the busy road, nothing to obscure the view except the Vacancy sign, the second a dark, the light bulbs spent.
Others checked in, but there must have been something about us, lined up in lawn chairs, drinking, sometimes crying, because no one said hello, no one nodded to us acknowledging our presence.
They passed by on their way to their rooms from the reception desk, locking themselves inside, leaving us to our grief.
There was no church funeral. Kiju would not have wanted that.
Instead, we held a small service in the reception area of the funeral home.
I paid the local volunteer fire department’s ladies’ auxiliary to provide tea and coffee, small squares and triangle sandwiches, the mainstays of all rural functions, whether celebrating or grieving.
At the front beside the urn there was a picture of her when she was younger, the one and only time she had posed for a portrait.
Each time someone stopped to look at her photo I wondered what they were remembering.
I was overwhelmed by my own inability to focus on any one memory.
No single event stood out, they melted together like a collage, full of light and colour.
“I remember when she used to be a midwife,” said one old lady, leaning on a cane and wearing all black, including her little lace gloves.
“She was a midwife until the end,” I said. “She never stopped wanting to bring babies into the world.”
“Yes, I guess that’s right. People just have safer options now, I guess.”
She went to say something else, but I interjected. “If you’ll excuse me.”
I turned and walked away.
It was a short reception, over in under two hours.
The flowers that adorned the table beside her picture seemed limp, defeated.
Or maybe tired from having to carry the weight of both beauty and grief.
I took the photo and her urn and placed them in the back seat, leaving the flowers and the leftover food at the funeral home.
Sitting in the car, the remains of my one true family member strapped in the back, her smiling eyes looking out at me from a picture taken decades ago, I cried again.
I thought I was done with the tears, but I hadn’t got to cry for my mother, so maybe I was due for this unsurmountable amount of grief.
Sally and Ben had left from the service.
They were needed at home to care for their grandchildren and their little store, which was less for supplies now and more for tourists, offering coffee and Sally’s homemade luski, baked or fried, along with Mi’kmaw crafts, created by actual Mi’kmaw people as opposed to the cheap plastic dream catchers they sell at gas stations and the airport.
I’d checked out of the hotel and was going to head directly back to the city.
I had the rest of the week off, but I couldn’t see myself spending my time here, alone.
There was no one I knew here anymore. The place seemed foreign to me.
There is a word that I learned long ago that has somehow managed to find a place permanently in my memory.
Hiraeth, homesickness for a place you have never been.
But I had been here, I knew this place, yet it seemed so distant, so unrecognizable, without Kiju there to go home to.
The teenage Aliet felt comfortable here; the adult Aliet felt like an intruder.
Before I drove back to the city, I decided to stop by the house to ensure it was locked and there was nothing perishable to attract rodents.
But first, I took her ashes from the back seat and made my way to the birthing tree.
She’d never said what she wanted me to do with them, but I couldn’t imagine having them sit on a mantel or in a closet somewhere.
She needed to be where she belonged, and I could think of nowhere better than the tree, the place where she had been truly happy.
I stood among the strong roots as the sun, pushing through the rain clouds that were fast approaching, lit up the last of the summer leaves.
I opened the urn, thanked her for everything she had given me and scattered her ashes.
There was something pure and final about it, not necessarily sad but comforting.
When I returned to the house an unfamiliar car was waiting.
A man in a nondescript grey suit climbed out.
“Are you the granddaughter?”
“I am. Can I help you?” I said as I placed the empty urn back in my car.
“I tried to get you at the service, but you left before I could speak to you. I’m the lawyer in charge of your grandmother’s estate.”
The word estate seemed slightly ridiculous as I looked around at the dilapidated house, the garden that had already started to wilt and die without her gentle hand; the outhouse, no longer in use but standing as a testament to our past, and the grass, unmowed now since Kiju was trying to be a friend of the earth and had decided to let the grass grow wild and free.
Last summer when I was down, we had fun throwing wildflower seeds into the wet grass after a hard rain.
I think the birds feasted on the seeds since only a few pink lupines, a handful of bluets and goldenrod grew in patchy in among the tall grass.
“Her estate?”
“Yes, it’s quite simple really, she left everything to you.
I just need you to sign this document and I will send you a copy in a week or so and everything will be settled.
” He handed me a thick legal document with tabs.
I leaned over the hood of his car and signed where I was told to.
I didn’t read a word. He took it and threw it into the front seat.
“And this.” He handed me my grandmother’s wooden box, the box that held all her treasures. “There is a list when you open it. I catalogued everything in it for the paperwork. The contents of the house are also in the document you just signed. I’m sorry about your grandmother. I’ll be in touch.”
“How did you get this?” I asked, perhaps with too much suspicion in my voice.
“The funeral home called and informed us of her passing. She had everything pre-arranged. She didn’t want to leave you with the burden that often accompanies death.
In her will there was a note to give the box directly to you, but we did have to review the contents in the event of any, well, undeclared wealth. ”
“Undeclared wealth?” I nearly laughed. Had he looked at this home, its contents, old and threadbare, scratched and worn? A roof in need of repair, a window about to fall out of its casing?