I just read a piece one of the women in my writing group shared with me about ashes. I made myself oversleep this morning hoping that not getting up at five would leave me less exhausted than I've been and I don't have time to ask if I can share some of that writing. It's excellent writing and informed how my eyes see the world today which is what good writing does for me. Changes me in a tangible, hard to describe way. It stays with me and the words are a part of me forever. I love that about the reading part of this love affair with words. I am so grateful I know and am known by a community of writers. I am so glad to be able to write and read and listen and share. It's big work Jen always says and so it is. It changes me. The words crawl in to rest in my bones, settle in my belly, tickle at my throat. I love carrying these words with me, with the added delight of knowing and spending time with the women that wrote them.
Yesterday I happened to have a rare appointment with my therapist who I have known now for at least 15 years, maybe more. I don't really remember. I remember the day Candace, the doctor type person who had known me for at least that many years said- you have to see a therapist and you have to see this specific therapist. She doesn't do sliding scale. Go. Candace is one of the really good ones. She always gave me choices if there were choices. She never said I had to do anything unless it was a life threatening thing. I took her seriously. In fact this therapist, D, didn't slide, normally. But she did a sliding scale for me and still does. She is smart, a no bullshit, we don't deal with anything we don't have to kind of therapist. She has great intuition and loves to laugh and we have spent as much time laughing as crying in that office. And I trust her as much as I can trust a human being which is sadly limited by my life experiences. I trust no-one absolutely. But she's up there. She is also unflappable.
When I showed up yesterday carrying a large double bagged target bag which hit the floor in the middle of her office with a heavy thump she just looked expectant. When I said, sorry it's not a present. The ashes came. She just sat down and said "It's not every day this happens." It was surreal and slightly horrible and in the back of my head, extremely funny carrying my mother's ashes around yesterday. I had to stop at the seven eleven because I felt like I was going to vomit so I got a soda. I left her on the counter over the Popsicles. I was secretly hoping someone would take the enticing looking target bag and I live in a neighborhood where the odds were good that would happen. She was waiting for me when I paid for my soda. We kept going with me sweating like I do when I'm carrying a fear to D's office, my heart was racing and it's good my feet knew the way because my brain wasn't doing much but buzzing. I kept thinking she was heavy. I vowed to lose weight so my ashes won't feel so heavy when I'm gone from the world.
We got their early and sat on the sidewalk, me in my red converse and serous boy pants, smoking, she in her cardboard box and polka dot bag. I had thoughts about carrying her around in my life till we scatter her ashes. I thought of strange visual art projects with pictures of the woman in the bag at coffee houses, at the switchboard I volunteer at, at the grocery store. I thought about the symbolism of that weight. When my arm got tired of carrying her as far away from me as I could I slung the bag over my shoulder and felt the weight on my back. The symbolism of that- well nothing needs to be said about that. Each time I set her down I thought about what that felt like. Setting my mother down. The weight of her condensed down into ash and bone. The setting down of all hope of one day being good enough to love, the setting down of every small and large thing she ever did to me. The setting down of love, my first true love, the kind you don't recover from even when you break up with your mother, even when you severe ties.
My therapist who always puts the fears right in the center of the office and has me face them, asked if she could take the box out. It was set on the little footstool that matches the leather chair I sat in. I stared at the box and my hands were shaking. She asked if I wanted to open the box or if I wanted her to open the box. She handed me scissors. I have a knife in her office that she has locked away for safe keeping. That's another story. I started cutting through yards and yards of tape. I joked about how it would take 55 minutes to open the box. She started to help me. The back of my mind was making a dark comedy movie as we struggled through not one but two boxes to find her at last, in a pretty purple bag, cushioned in bubble wrap. My cousin did an excellent job wrapping her up. I managed to pick the bag up. I said she would like this color. I looked inside and there was a heavy black plastic box with her name on it. I was relieved that it wasn't my father's ashes too. I had wondered if they had been shipped to me together even though I said I had no interest in my father's remains. I was relieved to see just that one black box. There was no woman who came to life. No paranormal stirrings of the air around me. No ghostly feelings. Just two alive women who have known each other for a long time, who have spent hours working to release this dead woman's hold on me, holding her remains. D asked me if I wanted to see inside. She is a smart woman. Get the fear all the way out into the room.
The crematorium wasn't as good at packaging as my cousin. When we opened the box the ashes were leaking from the plastic bag. Why on earth wouldn't you double bag ashes? The ashes started to sprinkle themselves on the black leather footstool and the carpet. They got on my hands. We got it closed back up and then spent some time with me freaking out that I had dead mother on my hands, picking up bits of ash with tissue and putting them in the small garbage can. I said, god she would hate her ashes being sprinkled in your office. D laughed, saying yes she would. My mother hated therapists, and hated mine in particular. I apologized for getting dead woman in her office. D said I have a vacuum. I spazzed looking at my hands in horror. Out out damn spot. They felt soiled. She said go wash your hands with that nice lavender soap, you'll feel better. It will wash off. It did wash off. I came back in and my mother was back in her colorful target bags and we talked about what I would do with her until we could scatter the ashes.
We talked about how wrong ash scattering could go. She said you don't want to just dump them at the shore line of the ocean. She did that once with a friend sprinkling her mother's ashes. She said the mother goes out, the mother comes back, the mother goes out, the mother comes back. She said you don't want your toes in that surf and you want to remember how the tide works because it washes it all back up on the beach. She also pointed out that it was illegal and to please make sure she didn't get a call from a jail somewhere because I tried to scatter the ashes and got caught. It's against the law. Makes sense actually. That whole ash thing is misleading. Because of the bones. The ash wasn't a regular gray it was sort of dull orange and gray. Like a dark orange mixed with brown on a pallet where you've dropped a blob of white paint and a chunk of cigarette ash in and mixed it all together. It felt very dry on my hands.
D said you will need to divide the ashes up into smaller bags of mother so that you can get them into the water without getting them all over your hands. I had a vision of a scale and pot bags and measuring out my mother into separate bags. D had a lot of good advice. The experience was not without laughter. Laughter and terror and horror and just plain ewness. It was perfect. The box is now on the top shelf of my closet, in target bag wrapping because there is loose ash on the purple bag she's in and lint. She'd hate that lint I had said and D and I picked off what we could. My mother used to pick up tiny bits of lint that she called bubbies, off of the carpet. Some too small to see with the normal naked mortal eye.
So the ominous cardboard box is gone. They mystery too. I have seen the contents of the brown cardboard box, I have seen the black box in the pretty purple bag with my mother's name written on it in cursive, I have seen the contents of the black box and they are inert. I have felt the ash on my hands and my hands are still my hands. They did not wake up and act any differently. Nobody got hurt, nothing got destroyed or warped. These words are being typed as they always are each morning.
I want her scattered as soon as possible. I still want the ashes gone, but I am no longer haunted by the box. Scatter and sprinkle and set free are all nice and poetic and inexact terms for the actual dealing with body remains. I see now that scattering is not an accurate word. I don't have a better one yet.
Death is messy no matter which way you go, in the ground or into the fire. It made me sad to think that she might have to wait till her bone fragments disintegrate to move on to the next thing. Sometimes I think that whatever we think happens after death is what happens for us. What we think we will see is what we will see. Which would work out great for me because I've always been certain I will finally get my favorite wish- to fly like a bird. I'm looking forward to it.
***
No time to tidy up this writing, or to find the right poems. These are the poems that resonated today-
[as freedom is a breakfastfood]
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
as freedom is a breakfastfood
or truth can live with right and wrong
or molehills are from mountains made
—long enough and just so long
will being pay the rent of seem
and genius please the talentgang
and water most encourage flame
as hatracks into peachtrees grow
or hopes dance best on bald men’s hair
and every finger is a toe
and any courage is a fear
—long enough and just so long
will the impure think all things pure
and hornets wail by children stung
or as the seeing are the blind
and robins never welcome spring
nor flatfolk prove their world is round
nor dingsters die at break of dong
and common’s rare and millstones float
—long enough and just so long
tomorrow will not be too late
worms are the words but joy’s the voice
down shall go which and up come who
breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs
deeds cannot dream what dreams can do
—time is a tree(this life one leaf)
but love is the sky and i am for you
just so long and long enough
E.E. Cummings, “[as freedom is a breakfastfood]”
The History of Red
BY LINDA HOGAN
First
there was some other order of things
never spoken
but in dreams of darkest creation.
Then there was black earth,
lake, the face of light on water.
Then the thick forest all around
that light,
and then the human clay
whose blood we still carry
rose up in us
who remember caves with red bison
painted in their own blood,
after their kind.
A wildness
swam inside our mothers,
desire through closed eyes,
a new child
wearing the red, wet mask of birth,
delivered into this land
already wounded,
stolen and burned
beyond reckoning.
Red is this yielding land
turned inside out
by a country of hunters
with iron, flint and fire.
Red is the fear
that turns a knife back
against men, holds it at their throats,
and they cannot see the claw on the handle,
the animal hand
that haunts them
from some place inside their blood.
So that is hunting, birth,
and one kind of death.
Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.
Red was the infinite fruit
of stolen bodies.
The doctors wanted to know
what invented disease
how wounds healed
from inside themselves
how life stands up in skin,
if not by magic.
They divined the red shadows of leeches
that swam in white bowls of water:
they believed stars
in the cup of sky.
They cut the wall of skin
to let
what was bad escape
but they were reading the story of fire
gone out
and that was a science.
As for the animal hand on death’s knife,
knives have as many sides
as the red father of war
who signs his name
in the blood of other men.
And red was the soldier
who crawled
through a ditch
of human blood in order to live.
It was the canal of his deliverance.
It is his son who lives near me.
Red is the thunder in our ears
when we meet.
Love, like creation,
is some other order of things.
Red is the share of fire
I have stolen
from root, hoof, fallen fruit.
And this was hunger.
Red is the human house
I come back to at night
swimming inside the cave of skin
that remembers bison.
In that round nation
of blood
we are all burning,
red, inseparable fires
the living have crawled
and climbed through
in order to live
so nothing will be left
for death at the end.
This life in the fire, I love it.
I want it,
this life.
Linda Hogan, “The History of Red” from The Book of Medicines. Copyright © 1993
***
as freedom is a....
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This life in the fire...
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This is how to set your mother down...or...This is how I set my mother down...or...How will I ever set my mother down...
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Red is the or red is this...or make a list of colors and pick one that pulls at you...
***
I want to tell you the truth or I don't want to tell you the truth about...
***
I hope this day is so good to you and your creative.
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