We’re driving from Coarsegold to Yosemite where my father had wanted his ashes spread. It’s an early spring day in February and still amongst the remnants of another winter. We are untouchable, like the patches of snow that are drawn high over the earth; sheets of white perfection coat the hillside. Our car winds across the floor of the forest and over the creeks as we make a steady climb in elevation. The sun is breaking through the branches of the sequoias; a confetti of sun specks begin to shimmer through the car window. We, I think, are still alive. I wonder how many of us there really are in the car?
The first month after my father’s death, his ashes were returned in a standard plastic box and sat disguised by a wiry candelabra on the fireplace mantle. One day at my mother’s house over lunch, she told me she couldn’t handle having the ashes in the same room anymore. “He’s in my dresser,” she said, looking down, taking a bite of salad. There he was, sitting in the bottom drawer of the dresser, his essence comingling in the dark with her bras and underwear, only three drawers above. Maybe there’s no place he’d rather be—surrounded by the sweetness of my mother, the softness of her cashmere sweaters tucked around him with traces of her Prada perfume slowly intoxicating his new world—a silence of place, where he’d see how love can be found in small and patient spaces—a place, where nothing could take away this newfound reassurance, as strong as the spiritual, or timeless when you know your god. This is the kind of love we look for our whole lives. This is what it’s really about—these quiet moments, just the two of them, undisturbed by bills, not the sliding stock market, no rotting wooden boats, the NASCAR wheels silent from whining from the television, even cancer.
There’s something so final about spreading ashes. Something, someone, is slipping from your hands, spilling all over the place. A piece of you becomes separated while you watch it return to the earth, and you know you’ll never really get it back, you know things will never quite be the same. And, now, almost a year and half later, I’ll learn one of the most common phrases after the loss of a loved one is: If I could just see them one more time. Clichés around death are foreign to me; yet, there is a bit of sanctity in knowing there are rituals to fall back on. I only learn this after having entered the house of ash. I’m no stranger to grief, so they had no choice, but to let me in.
* * *
I’ve grown so envious of my memories. They carry all the weight, and have taken on a spastic-like personality. They nudge me to remember and remind me of the years past with something so simple, like when I inhale rosemary or thyme. The memories of the last seven years living in the central valley have moved in on me. I have my mother stop the car so I can take a picture of a moss-covered rock wall with a tide pool at the bottom. I know there’s life in there and that’s when I become crowned by nostalgia. She shows me images of myself. I don’t have a chance to be human, to tell you that I don’t like what I see, or what I would have changed, instead, I begin to finally see: I am swimming in the emerald waters of Bass Lake; all around me are the people I love and the conversations I cannot hear inside the boats with their lips parting for another beer; the hawks circling the sun; and the waves of summer finally beginning to feel so near.
Sometimes, we have to believe in the unseen. Today, I’m hoping closure will take form and tell me that everything is alright. That’s all I ever really want to hear. Sometimes, I have to ask the people I love the most to say it to me. I always believe them. Today, I’m not prepared for the memory-linked diversions, like discovering how much I miss the high sierras, a place grown absent in my life after leaving my ex-boyfriend four years ago. But, this is not a sinkhole…only a boxcar of memories that are traveling parallel with us. I think about all the years we shared here—the boating, snow skiing, coffee at the Ahwahnee Hotel and their gift shop, my hands traveling over homemade soaps, malachite bears, crystal bouquets, and how the rose quartz earrings looked held to one of my ears. I begin to snap over forty photographs in the car on the way to the vista point my mother has in mind for the ashes. I don’t want to lose the present tense, so I keep snapping. My ex-boyfriend sneaks in again and floods my senses with the smell of wood and pine, reminding me of the scents I could find at his neck. I find his face in the designs of the bark; everything blurs passed me, now, including you, goodbye, my ex, goodbye. Maybe the pictures I’m taking will provide answers. It’s as if I’m trying to remember something I have forgotten about myself. Maybe closure is another cliché in life we allow ourselves to become easily attached to.
* * *
At the first vista point, handfuls of tourists pose for pictures at the wall’s edge. I guess the greatest compliment you could give Half Dome is to have your back to it. How are we going to spread three-pounds of ashes with all these people around? I’m not going to be able to handle anyone asking, “Whose ashes are those? We’re sorry.” So, we stand there, the bag of ashes in my mother’s left hand, and wait. Eventually, the tourists began to thin out so we make our way to the center of the vista point in direct view of Half Dome. My mother begins to shake my father out of the bag; her arms are outstretched and above her head and gently moving them up and down. She looks like a bird preparing to take flight. Don’t leave me here without you, mom. I can’t do this without you.
“There’s no wind! This isn’t what I wanted for him,” My mother says, turning around and facing at me. Splotches of ash have been riveted to my mother’s hands and wrists, and have smeared down the front of her white parka vest. We lean over the wall and see my father on a dirt ledge; he’s been reduced to a small ant hill of ash. My mother tosses fistfuls of ash into the air in an attempt to get what little wind there is to catch my father and carry him at a greater distance into the canyon below. Meanwhile, I’m snapping pictures, one right after another. Frustrated my camera doesn’t have a motor drive, I try to capture every phase thick ash might go through—from the moment it leaves the bag, to dissolving into the air. Death is a heavy resin and it seems predictable, but it’s not. We can’t talk about it; we might have to face our own mortality. But here, I’m almost convinced that there’s an element of flight after death, or at least there should be. It’s the ones we leave behind who have to become the wings for the silent. It’s almost an insult to the dead if we can’t offer them the opportunity to fly. Even with no wind, we’ve become embraced by ash. My father, now reduced to color of grayish black, is under my mother’s fingernails and twisting out beneath her wedding ring. I stand back and watch, lick my lips, and taste ash.
We decide to find another vista point. I have no idea how my father would have felt changing locations. He might have argued, telling us there’s plenty of wind and to just get it over with. Maybe, unintentionally, this ash ritual is being dragged out. After my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer I watched the fire, an anger that lived in the pit of his belly begin to smolder out and his approach to fatherhood became radically compromised and like two friends catching up, our conversations became mutually interactive while we waited for dinner. I can still see the image of my mother standing behind the flumes of smoke that rose from her skillets, the exhaust fan chewing at the air, and the three of us screaming across the room in efforts to communicate over the blare of the television, exhaust fan, and the fish sizzling itself into an oblivion. But, it’s this constant chaotic oblivion that allowed us to survive, making us a lucky family. We could escape death. Sizzle, sizzle, I say, to the fish!
Sometimes, survival requires one to find the necessary distractions. It became easier to live when the shock wore off when my father was initially diagnosed with only three months to live. He’d go on to live ten more years; together, we dodged his tumors, bone scans, and blood tests revealing a high cancer cell counts. Sometimes the cancer cell count went down and he’d sit in his den and map out trips, sanding and painting the motor home he’d never use. I believed we were tricking death, out-smarting ourselves, giving us time to catch our breath, and relax in the comfort of another subject—anything to distract us from what we really knew lie ahead.
We’re the only ones at the second vista point. My mother leans over the rock wall and pours more of my father over the edge. I sit in the car this time, watching my mother, snapping only a few shots this time. She returns to the car, covered in ash. The smell of my father floods the cabin of the car. My mother asks if I want to spread the remaining of his ashes. I take the bag and pour the last of his ashes over the edge.
I can’t remember what I was looking at as the ashes skipped down the side of the mountain. I remember my dog, Max, who began whimpering in the back seat of the car. It’s as if he could sense my father was near. We were silent once we climbed back into the car and headed home. I don’t know what I was supposed to feel with the ashes gone. What do most people feel after they spread ashes of someone they love. I hear it’s a sense of closure, but I’m nowhere near this. It wasn’t like the way they show it in the movies: the lack of wind, ash on our clothes, face, lips, a crying dog in the back seat, an ex-boyfriend, and old memories floating to the surface. Instead, I feel empty, and I wait for a new emotion to come, and it does. I begin to cry, cry for everything. I’m homesick for something that I’ve lost within myself. I stare at the trees and watch them became smaller and smaller as our car winds down the highway, the elevation dropping by the thousands. On the backseat of my mother’s car, a plastic bag sits, empty with dust.
