Day 2: Thinking of Kitty

Tomorrow, it's back to reality reality. But today, an attempt to deal with some of thoughts and emotions:

Dear Grandma,

Your oldest daughter, my mother, picked up your ashes this morning. It’s been two weeks since the rainy Thursday afternoon where my phone rang, and I knew what the news was. My phone cut out. My voice was already cracking when I called my mom back. I asked if you were gone, and she answered yes. And now, your body is gone; it is gone and then returned to us in the form of the gone. I will not see your face again; your face is gone. It was your wish—as it is mine—that what stays here on the earth is only dust to be dispersed.

It was never easy to know you, Grandma. I don’t know what you would think of us finding laughs in the minutiae of your death. After her first visit to the crematorium, my mom told me the story of being upsold on the receptacle for your remains. She hadn’t anticipated the complex logistics of design; do you choose the tube that is painted with pansies and has holes on top, so you can sprinkle the ashes out like garlic salt? Or the stately and lugubrious urn—because later, when its contents have been deposed, what on earth do you do with it? Ultimately, she chose a biodegradable box painted with an eagle which could be set free in water—this way, you see, no one need take chances with the direction of the wind. She and I got some mileage from the clever marketing of receptacle designers. She said you would “turn in your urn” if you knew what kind of money she spend on this cardboard eagle box. We laughed hysterically—perhaps too hysterically.

Our family doesn’t do funerals. That last act of letting you go will come long after you have gone. After we have tunneled into winter and passed under the change of a year, after we have emerged into cold early spring and then it warms, and becomes summer, perhaps we will let you go. Perhaps a few of us will gather at the ocean, and that tacky but environment-friendly container—it’s fitting, as it reminds me for some reason of the RV in which you spent more of our childhood away from us, living the cyclical life of a snowbird—will be gently set out from the back of the boat, its bobbing glide stately, queenly as you were, until its hard surfaces turn soft and the ocean begins the quick work of taking the thing apart. I see the glide and the gurgle, the sailing and the subsuming, the release and then the reclamation as the sea swallows the last soft dust of you.

The facts of your death seem real to me; it is the facts of your life that do not. The reality of a life’s end is the sorting, the culling, the remembering that takes place over boxes of life’s trivia which calls, now that its collector is gone, for some kind of order. Your things had hovered in the purgatory of things; you were never coming back for them. You lived, but forgot; you forgot the number of your children, the long shared life with your husband, your jewelry and your photographs and the yellowed documents which tug our heartstrings: certificates of birth, of degree, of death. You had forgotten them but they, your pictures, your papers, your kitsch, still has something to say about your life. We want to hear those things. We are not prepared to hear those things. We still can’t find the things we need to hear.

There were a lot of tears this last weekend, Grandma. Your three grown children (for a time, in the last couple of years, you asked about the fourth. We will never know what memory or missed opportunity might have been that second son to you, that third little girl) gathered here to make sense of what you’d left behind. It was a treasure hunt; there were tiny treasures. Your first born broke over your wedding vows. Your daughters hugged him hard. My sister found a box marked “Keep”—it contained cards we’d written you and craft projects we’d made you over the years. Somehow, I never knew you’d cherished these bits of us.

It is your art that breaks me. When I came to my mom’s house one night, she told me to look inside a photo album resting on top of the coffee table. In it there were photographs, blurry photographs of paintings, your paintings. Most of them, we had never seen. We had some beauty you left us; we didn’t have all of it or, we discovered, the best of it. There is such life in your mountainscapes. The pictures frame the paintings, images of images, and you are only in one of them. In it, you pose before a craft fair booth laden with your paintings. We never knew you were prolific. There are Oregon clouds or Washington clouds and your art and you, looking proud, looking like a queen. It hurts and it heals to know these pieces of your soul are somewhere, at large in the world.

I wish I had known you better.