I suppose the real regret of not really knowing her began to emerge when I was a teen-ager, but it became most compelling, predictably, when I had to disperse her ashes. For what I am sure were good reasons, none of which I can now recall, and despite being the youngest of three with a father still living, the task of sprinkling her remains was assigned, perhaps by default, to me. I did it alone one warm and sunny morning, having told no one what I was about to do.
The crematorium had called twice to say mother’s ashes were ready before I picked her up, then, instead of scattering the ashes immediately, I took them home and placed them under my bed. It was months before I retrieved them for the priest-like act of dispersal, even though she had told me exactly where and how and when she wanted it done. On the day I chose, I placed her on the car seat next to me – the car boot did not seem right – and made my way to the Japanese Gardens. Her name in gothic print caught my eye and at every glance, I felt the need to make conversation like strangers on a bus may feel but I resisted, not knowing how or where to begin.
According to her repeated wishes, I made my way toward a public garden I knew she loved. As I prepared to cross the wooden bridges into the carefully manicured gardens, holding the box uneasily away from my body, all of what I had not done as a son tumbled through my mind in the uneasy and disjointed style of a rather crass home movie.
I walked the carefully tended lawns holding her at arm’s length, tripping over my guilt. Persisting to a place I considered more beautiful than any other, from some distant universe, relayed through the sky, reflecting off the ocean to the surrounding trees, moving through my body and securing me to the earth, I heard Mother affirm my choice of rolling deep green landscape and I held the box to my chest and stood alone against the moment, this final act, a sense of wonder, an acknowledgement of deep regret.
I waited.
I was ready to spread the ashes.
Seated on my haunches, I rented the box open, peered at the gravel, white and coarse, and I placed my fingers knuckle deep, feeling the dry chalk and dust. I felt again the talcum powder she so liberally used in the sweet-smelling, steamy bathroom of fogged mirrors and slippery floors, wet with scattered, twisted towels. I saw again the powder’s trace from the bathroom to her bedroom to the tranquil gardens that surrounded me, and I knew again the scented smell, strong and lingering all through the house of my early years. Her sandy remains powdered my hands, falling easily through my fingers to the grass around my feet and to the beds of colorful flowers. The ashes fell into the colors of the tropical flowers and became part of the robust flesh, touched then, with new and delicate shading. Her dust colored the dirt between the rows of saplings, lending it a sallow complexion. Remains blew and landed, leaving a trail of white against the sturdy, solid green of the African buffalo grass.
When the dust had settled, I tipped the drab empty box, her full name declared loudly in a gothic font on one side, into a refuse bin I saw attached to a nearby tree and broke into a steady run, weaving my way past crowds of playing children, adults chatting on picnic blankets, all oblivious of my morbid but accomplished, task.
I cried all the way home. My chest heaved. My body rocked. When my throat clogged with phlegm, I stopped the car at a familiar clearing in a sugarcane field to vomit. Bent double, I got out and, as if from the center of the Earth, spewed a lifetime of missing the mark.
Then I turned from the pungent odor, shut the car door and made my way home.
I gave Dad the paperwork the next time I saw him.
It was easier to spread the ashes than I thought.
I should have done it sooner.
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