My sister dreamed of scattering her ashes in a gorgeous sunset at sea. Instead our large sailing yacht full of family members encountered stormy dark skies and steep waves outside the marina. My brother in law leaned over the helm with his thick sweeping eyebrows dripping seawater. Fifteen or more of us huddled nauseous in the cockpit, ducking plumes of sea pray that burst over the bow. Ever since Dina came home from the hospital to die, she had been taking photos of setting suns from her bed overlooking the Pacific, just south of Los Angeles. Photos of fiery orbs that she mailed to family and friends. They were not photos that felt like the serene acceptance of the end of the day, at least not for me, but photos of stormy orbs burning through the darkness like the staring iris of a leopard at night. “This is my holy city,” she told everyone. “This is where I am going.”
It was not for us to believe or disbelieve Dina’s vision of a holy city, or of her return to the wild, as I came to understand it. Her fantasies, or what some of us might have thought were her delusions had nothing to do with it. This was her last wish, simple as that. The last of a succession of wishes over the years. We had accepted them all, as if each were her last. Not to be challenged. No matter how hopeless her cancer had become, if she said she would get better, we went along with it. No matter how many years she endured a disabling marriage, disabled courage to defend herself and family, as long as she maintained appearances, we went along with them. Just like all of us together on this boat headed out to throw her ashes into a nonexistent sunset, plunging toward her nonexistent holy city.
When my brother telephoned me that the time had come, I drove south from my home in Los Angeles to say Goodbye. It would only be hours, a day, or a few days, my brother told me. One of her doctors had provided an overdose of morphine to spare her the final moments of this hideous disease devouring her alive. But I heard later that her husband had become so distraught that he had balked at administering the dosage in time. No doubt my brother had kept his head, but Dina’s husband never listened to anyone. In any case Dina’s death had turned into a nightmare, judging from the silence, if not the guilt I sensed from family who witnessed her end. No one shared any details later, and I didn’t want them. Failing at death is unspeakable. All of us were guilty I suppose. None of us knew how to do it right. There was no Tibetan priest with the book of the dead to guide her.
I would not be able to wait around till she died. I had a wife, a job, kids to get to school. She might have lived for another week or more. No one knew. Coming to say goodbye was the only choice I had. I sat on the edge of her bed. Nothing I could say fit the moment. Nothing going on in my life, or the freeway traffic getting to her house. I really didn’t want to say something stupid or maudlin. Or not say anything at all. I told her she would always be in my heart. I told her I loved her. But my words, like my eyes, fell to the floor. Even my tears felt insincere! Whatever I said seemed no more than a mirage, which I would get up and disappear in. Dina understood, and smiled. Her eyes were eager to make a connection. Both of us were. I could see that she was scared, weakened, definitely looking at me for the last time. That look not bound by time or circumstances. Like some other intelligence was looking through her eyes. The kind of look that looks back at you the rest of your life.
I held her fingers, her long lovely fingers that played Bach and Chopin so well on the piano. Intelligent fingers that were patient and kind. Fingers with the strength to wield a tennis racket like a champion. Truth telling fingers folded quietly upon her stories. The best avocado and butter lettuce salad mixing fingers. Dina’s fingers, her lovely hands, her gifted hands. Hands of a beautiful human being, ill equipped for the life she had encountered. I stood, and my legs took three gravity bound steps to the door. She tilted her chin up over her shoulder as I passed. She watched me disappear in the door crack as I pulled the latch till it clicked.
My steps were slow down the hallway. I knew she was listening. Just as I would be. Every creak amplified horribly. I thought suddenly how far I had to drive back to my home up the 405, and that I should take a pee before I left. I turned back to the bathroom at the end of the hall. I passed Dina’s door again. It seemed as shut and sealed as a white slab of stone in a crypt. Except it was as if I were on other side, hearing myself like signals from a radio telescope on a snow capped peak aimed at the stars. I clenched my teeth upon the choke and gush of water when I flushed the toilet, and then again at the intruding hiss of water into the sink. The collision of the hand towel ring against the backside of her bedroom wall left me feeling completely exposed. I stepped out of the bathroom and stood in front of her door, confused about which side I was on. I did not deserve to be alive, not more than her. My time would come soon enough. I was already standing with my nose pressed up against my own death just like her door. Then my hand turned the door knob, and the door opened. My sister was already looking straight up at me as I peered in.
She almost laughed. So did I. “I was hoping you would come back in,” she said. We were both completely relieved for an instant. I leaned down and embraced her. Her frame lifted easily in my arms. She had become surprisingly weightless, her fading palpable. I looked at her one last time and saw that her smile had become brittle. Her weight seemed to have slid to either side of it like a broadening crack. I held her tighter. And then it felt as if she were pulled from me, and I left.
No one in the family dared question her sweet determination. Horrible things so often happen to the innocent. Everyone secretly feared that for Dina. She had been Daddy’s girl, I guess you could say. She knew how to please everyone. By the time I was in my early twenties travelling the world, Dina was about 31 years old. Her life had all the appearances of success. A Vogue Model, Degrees from Stanford University, a teacher at a prestigious girl’s school in Los Angeles, a beautiful family with 4 children, beautiful huge home in Brentwood with a handsome and charming, if not brilliant, lawyer husband. She was the sweetest and dearest person. An angel, our mother said.
Dina’s and my completely opposite polarities formed something more than a sibling bond between us. We were opposite extremes. I was the person who knew I would never fit in, and she was the master of fitting in at any cost. Maybe by design neither of us had a chance. The costs were high for both of us. My Dad’s hopes for me to follow him into his beloved business had long ago settled in the dregs of his martini glass during those business lunches he insisted I attend. He dragged me along, as if I would suddenly be reborn eating steaks, my teeth chattering the latest goings on of the NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange. That is an unfair assessment of a man who devoted his life to his family. He loved me the best way he could. Finally that’s what we are left with. The best we could do.
Whenever I came back to Los Angeles, I visited Dina with wild travel stories, like a cat with a mouse that I put at my sister’s feet. We sat in her library where the rug I brought her from Kashmir hung ceremoniously on the wall over her desk. She kept the leather change purse I brought her from Afghanistan on a side table, alongside the old Tibetan money belt studded with large silver lotus flowers. She honored me for what I had done. She turned my inability to fit in, into worth, worthiness. Her unwavering attention made me feel confident that I had earned a place of respect and love. A harbor I gave thanks for. She never spoke once of her locked down life. She made the best Greek salads in her monkey pod wood salad bowl, and I knew I would always be at home with her.
My sisters Dina and Sara, married brothers which was weird, but no one in the family ever questioned what that meant, at least that I ever heard. Just happened that way. By coincidence. Just like their marriages and their husbands’ lives would both end tragically. By coincidence. Dina had two sons from her first marriage. Dina’s second husband, knew nothing at all about the heart it would take to raise teenage boys when he married her. But he was adept at exploiting her dependence. Seemed she would do anything to appear a good family, and her husband knew a lot about winning, that was his game as a trial lawyer for big business. Unchallenged he began to beat her children’s spirits down, reprimanded them till they physically quivered for any small thing, like not taking out the garbage cans. It was so painful to see the destruction of lovely young men. To witness him dressing them down, like pouring boiling water into a glass until their expressions cracked. Dina watched it happen to her own children, and they watched their mother crack, helplessness to protect them.
Her husband’s monstrous aggression horrified me. His irreverence and vitriol was so wicked that you almost had to laugh at times when he directed it at others. But he ruined my sister’s life and her children’s. I have a right to that opinion. He was a volcano in the house. Any culpability my sister might have had seemed nothing more than termites in rafters. Rafters that were already on fire. Nor did he have any regard for my Dad’s old-fashioned trust in him proving to be a noble man. He blew apart our family, as unflinchingly as his service to corrupt empire-building institutions that made him rich.
***
My brother in law’s grimace was set upon the sea ahead. He had some sailing experience, and drove the ship toward a point he had in mind to cast Dina’s ashes. The bow plunged into deeper troughs, heaving back heavier spray. Dina’s older sister Sara, me and my brother, and his wife huddled together in the cockpit. Our 75 year old mother held my two year old son her lap. Sitting next to her was my wife, Annica. My son, Kokko, by my first marriage gathered with his cousins, Dina’s 4 grown children. His mother had passed away only 2 years earlier of the same cancer as Dina’s. She had also come home to die, but had fasted to death. Dina had distanced herself from Kokko’s mom, as if her final acceptance of being untreatable were contagious.
Now here we all were in the same boat. Down below the platters and bowls of our ceremonial lunch, prepared just as my sister would have liked, crashed to the cabin floor in the rough seas. Broken china and food slid violently back and forth from wall to wall. The champagne bottles slammed against the baseboards and pitched down the steps exploding against the toilet door. I did my best to straighten things up. Years of adventuring at sea in a small sailboat had at least prepared me to be the only one who could go below without getting immediately sick. Others had already begun to heave their guts out over the side. But my brother in law clutched the helm with the vengeance of Captain Ahab for conquering the unconquerable. He looked totally mad. His obstinance might have been enough to have killed us all that very day.
Dina’s daughter handed her way over to me. “Are we going to be alright,” she asked, surprising me with this first ever show of doubt in her father.
“I don’t think so,” I shouted into her ear. “The boat is good and strong. But nobody here is prepared for this. We should turn back.”
It was agreed to scatter her ashes on the spot, and turn back to harbor. My brother in law took leave of the helm, and charged down the companionway to retrieve the tin urn given to him by the crematorium with Dina’s ashes. It sat on a shelf like a book in the main saloon. He frantically fumbled with the pliers trying to pry off the lid with one hand, while holding on with the other. I took the can from him, and he returned topsides to the helm. Then I stood beside him with the open urn as he shouted passages from a huge bible he had brought. His daughter helped him hold up a raincoat to protect it, but his furious sermon drowned in the turbulent weather. When he had finished, he grabbed the can from me, and bracing himself over the stern, he shook out voluminous whorls of ash. Suddenly an errant wind around the stern swept up all the ash into a large ore colored cloud and hurled the entire contents of the urn back at us. Ash and sharp bits of my sister’s bones pasted to our wet skin and hair, and covered our damp clothes. Everyone froze in their places unsure what to do.
I handed my way over to my mom, holding my two-year-old son, Matthew, in her lap. She was smiling, calmly smoothing her daughter’s ashes into her grey hair, and into my son’s fine blond hair. Her angel had flown to her. I forgot the others for a moment, and stood with her. I put a bit more ash into her hand that I had taken from the can, and she groomed me too, like she used to do when I was a kid.
The words none of us could ever find to say, had now been said. Dina had blown back over the brink to us. Her love, even her helplessness, would have always been enough. We motored the yacht back into the protected calm of the harbor, all of us covered in a skin of Dina’s remains.
Once dockside we salvaged what we could of the ceremonial food and champagne. We ate and drank in the soggy mess. In the wreck of the day, everything was finally as it should be. No one spoke, or made any effort to avoid the silence of the inner harbor, or within ourselves. There was no way to say goodbye to Dina’s sweet dream of the sun shining through at the end. Or hello to the storm we had all ignored for so long. Nor was there goodbye, to the love we shared from the other side of the door. Inevitably my beloved children will come one day. Open my door. I want to say to them not to try and say Goodbye. Just say hello, and leave me to what I have to do today.
Speak Your Mind