I try to imagine her as she might have looked when young, her hair tightly pinned into a French knot that wasn’t gray, but all I can see are her eyes, blue and intense and her thick soled sensible shoes. I hear her voice, matter-of-fact and reedy in tone. “Time to begin,” she says. “We don’t have all day.” I pry off the cannister’s lid and focus on the texture of the contents, looking for bits of bone.
We have chosen Race Point Beach, where the bay and ocean meet, as the place to spread Aunt Mazie’s ashes. My mother has brought the cardboard and metal cannister. I unscrew the top. The waves wear whitecaps and I wear a hoodie, attempting to keep my hair out of my face, but the wind is relentless.
If my aunt were here in the flesh she would tell me, you need an elastic, she would tell me, you are sitting on bits of dried seaweed and broken skate egg casings. Can’t you find a cleaner place? But I sense no ghost. Aunt Mazie didn’t believe in ghosts and whatever remains of my aunt, her body is gone.
Without their bodies the dead drift and glide in and out of our consciousness. I recall being five years old at a family gathering where she viewed pictures of our family’s newly purchased summer cottage. Her first reaction was not to compliment, but to share a critical observation. “The steps need painting,” she stated. I hear the phrase still, see the photograph in my mind of the steps, painted a maroon red, a few spots faded. The steps need painting. My mother repeated the remark several times over several years and children remember repetition. She sees an old cottage filled with interesting things—artwork, antiques and all she sees are that the steps need painting.
My aunt was a traveler. She had no children, never married. The smartest and most accomplished of my father’s three sisters, a psychiatric social worker, she’d headed an adoption agency in New York City. Her instructions were clear. Cremate my body. No burial.
She lives on in my memories and I remember all the keepsakes she brought me throughout childhood: the mug from Scotland embossed with my name, that I used for my milk flavored with coffee each morning. Also from Scotland, the wool plaid kilt I wore to elementary school, designed to adjust in size as I grew. From Israel, the silver flower necklace with the turquoise. And from Italy, the mosaic guitar shaped pin. I still have the tall skinny brass candlesticks, from where I do not know, sitting on the edge of the fireplace mantel in my bedroom.
I will miss the oddball aunt who made me feel valued.
I shove my hands in quickly to grab handfuls of the mixture, my mother moving slow, reluctantly participating. Once the ritual has started, I want to be done. I fling her ashes upwards, waiting for the wind to catch them. Around the world her ashes fly and there she goes, free from the bonds of physicality.
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