A week ago today, Monday, March 28, was what would have been Karen's 54th birthday. For us three remaining Coffeys, the day loomed large well before it arrived. Although the 21st of any month cannot pass without us mentally calculating how long it's been since Karen died (5 months), for the most part we have been doing well. Like, really well, surprisingly so. But her birthday was intimidating and we weren't sure how to deal with it or what to do.
In the end, we opted to more or less follow family tradition which dictates that the honored person gets to have their current favorite meal prepared for them. In Karen's case, that's meant fried chicken, asparagus, and mashed potatoes and gravy for the last 20+ years. So in her honor, I made a huge platter of chicken and the kids and I stuffed ourselves silly the way she would have. It wasn't sad or maudlin or anything; rather, it was kind of great. We talked about her, shared stories, and speculated on just how many pieces of chicken she would have devoured.
That said, the earlier part of that Monday caught me totally off guard. Like I said, we've been doing pretty well, myself included. But that morning I woke up and found that somehow I had been dragged back through time a good four months or so. The grief of that time descended upon me full force and I wept that morning for the first time in months. The rest of the day was a dull, grey wash of aching loss that lifted right about the time I started prepping the chicken.
It was a hell of a start to a long week.
On Friday, the kids and I flew to San Diego and checked into a ridiculously overpriced two bedroom suite with ocean views at the Hotel Del Coronado. The trip was unremarkable except for the poor TSA guy who wanted to do an explosives check on the box in my backpack. I was held up on the other side of the body scanner waiting for a fresh agent to scan me and watched anxiously as the guy opening up my backpack recoiled from the box as if it were packed with armored radioactive cobras. Miranda had politely informed him that her mother's ashes were in that box and he needed to wait for me. Sorry, dude. At the hotel that night, we had room service, lounged in the hot tub on the balcony, and noted repeatedly how much Karen would have loved it.
But Karen had always loved Coronado. She loved the ocean, she met me there, she met her best friend there, she fell in love with theatre there. It was, she had told me, the happiest time and place in her memory because she felt as if her life really began when she lived there.
On Saturday, I strapped my backpack on and the kids and I headed to the old high school. I had reached out to a former classmate who had become a teacher there to let us onto the grounds. After a tour of the dramatically changed school, my friend excused herself and left us alone. While the theatre was new it rested on the same footprint as the one where we had met. We sprinkled some ashes around the stage and I left a light dusting by the seats where she and I first spoke to each other some 37 years ago. We left, found her old house, and sprinkled some ashes by the tree out front. I tossed a handful of ashes on the corner of 2nd and Orange where we met every morning before school.
Then we chilled at the hotel most of the day.
After a lovely dinner with my parents and after my dad drove us around North Island so the kids could see where I used to live, the three of us returned to the hotel and I strapped that backpack on once again. It was long since dark and while the night was moonless, the stars provided enough light for us to march across the sand to the ocean. I pulled the remains from my backpack and carefully opened the bag. The ashes were both chalky and gritty, with unnerving bits of bone mixed in. We each took handfuls and stood there, wondering what to do next.
Words seemed to be in order but unlike the memorial service, I'd prepared nothing. Instead, we winged it, the three of us noting that we were together, we were good, we were having fun, and she would have been delighted with all of that.
And with that we began the scattering, sidearming handfuls of ash into the ocean, backpedaling quickly to avoid getting our feet and shoes wet, tossing the ash into the receding edge of the waves inches away from our toes. Dash took two huge handfuls and charged into the surf, releasing Karen when he was chest-deep in the Pacific. The ocean didn't take it all at once and the unearthly whiteness of the cremains practically glowed in the starlight against the dark wet sand. The last several handfuls we placed in a pile and watched as successive waves took increasingly larger portions until nothing was left. I turned the bag inside out, shook it to release the ash clinging to it, and that was that.
This was Karen's final wish and, with the exception of the clueless group of seven tourists who decided to stop their stroll practically on top of us even though it was ridiculously apparent what we were doing and maybe a little elbow room might have been in order, well, with the exception of them it went the way I think she would have wanted it.
On Sunday we went to the zoo and had a great time remembering previous visits with Karen.
And today, Monday, we came home. And, man alive, was I sad about it.
It's startling how the sadness still manages to ambush me. I had expected the scattering to be hard but it really wasn't; on the contrary, I think we actually kind of enjoyed it and that's exactly what Karen would have wanted. But while packing up and leaving this morning I found myself awash in a melancholy that still hasn't fully dissipated.
The cause of it is simple: we left her behind. She's not only not here, she's over there now, hundreds of miles away. While the metaphysical separation is challenging to wrap your brain around, the physical one is cruelly obvious. It's weird how deeply I feel leaving her last physical remains behind because I have been totally non-fixated on them in any way. I have barely given them a thought--for five months now they've been in a bag in a box in another bag in a closet in a room in a corner of the house I rarely go. I have literally not thought of them for months at a time. But for some reason, leaving that behind in a place that I, at best, will rarely ever visit, bruised a part of my heart anew.
I imagine that time will find new ways to freshen what will one day be an old wound and we will need to accept that and keep soldiering on. I have a small bit of ash set aside for my trip to New York in May and I imagine that leaving that bit behind will pain me just as much. Or maybe more. It is literally the last of her. But I'm thinking that the fact that I will be returning there throughout the rest of my life and, ideally, as a bunch of ashes after that life has run its course, will give me some measure of peace since it means we will be reunited periodically until we are both wafting through the city air.
That's my hope, at least. It sounds right to me. So I'm banking on that and forging ahead in the meantime.
