Day: August 26, 2024

Every summer I return to Second Beach in Middletown, Rhode Island, just outside Newport, where I swim in the waters where I scattered my mother’s ashes on a cold day in February, in 1991.

As was appropriate for her helter-skelter life, our modest memorial gathering of family, friends and our dogs on the wintry beach soon devolved into a little whirlpool of chaos. After assembling, parkas-clad, in a circle around the simple box of ashes and mustering soft focus tributes to our mother, which included a warbled verse of Amazing Grace and downing paper communion cups of her preferred scotch, it fell to me to commend her ashes to the sea.

A neighbor had lent me a pair of waders, last used a decade earlier in some New England trout stream, for the task.

And so I hoisted the box and waded slowly into the waves, cradling the box protectively in my arms as the onshore breeze strengthened. My brother tossed long stemmed memorial roses onto the waters, exciting the dogs, who splashed in alongside me, despite the icy waters.

It was all good—until the waders began to leak.

Knee deep in the icy bay now, I rushed to pry open the cardboard box, yank out the plastic bag of her remains, undo its sturdy clamp and complete my solemn task. Seagulls cawed overhead. As poured the litter into the water, a wind blast came up and blew Mom’s remains into my face.

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Requiem

“I’ll never forget face that day when you came back in from the water and whispered that the waders leaked,” a dear friend who’d been there recalled today. She’d reached out to offer me condolences on yet another death in my family, yesterday, of my grand nephew, Jack Timperley. As sad as that was, and is, we ended up marvelling (again) over the extraordinary sunshine that he brought into everyone’s lives.

Afflicted with Fanconi Anemia, which devastates the bone marrow and causes myriad severe medical and physical problems, Jack had a life expectancy of maybe 12-15 years when he was born in 1999. Subjected to repeated, difficult surgeries and hositalizations, which left him brittle-boned and tiny for his age, he could have curled inside himself and withdrawn into a life of self-pity and depression. But he did just the opposite, excelling at school, winning a legion of fans and, while hardly more than a tweener, creating a life as a creative entrepreneur, which he pursued until his final days. He had an astounding life.

Now, why, you might well ask, did I bury all this beneath an extended joke about my mother’s “funeral”? Because Jack was an almost surreal vehicle of joy everywhere he went, with everyone he knew and interacted with, even as a very young child. If he saw any of us supposed adults down, annoyed or arguing about something, he’d crack a smile and say (something like), “Hey, lighten up!” or “That’s not so bad.”

And that’s what my dear friend and I quickly fastened on as we talked about Jack today. As if he were on the phone with us from heaven, he pieced our gloom with our memories of his sweetness and light. We laughed amid our gloom. And then I went for a happy swim in the waters of Mom’s ashes.

Jack could do that.