Before I Am Dust

Last Sunday, I scattered my mother's ashes at the stretch of beach she had specified. She died earlier this year, and I was keeping the ashes until my older sister (who I refer to as "Gigi") decided what she was comfortable with regarding timing and her participation in scattering the ashes.

As readers may know from other blog posts, my sister and I are seriously and permanently estranged due to our differences over our mother's final months (managing her illness and finances, and related disagreements and hurts, led us to mutually tear our relationship apart).

Personally, I would have been fine scattering the ashes immediately after the cremation, but Gigi wasn't ready. She didn't know if she could be present (she has a sick, elderly husband), or if she even wanted to be present.

Because of the state of our relationship, and the fact Gigi had been so distant and uninvolved in the years leading up to this point, I told her I'd be fine if she decided she wanted to take care of final act on her own somewhere in the future. I would give her the ashes and the rest would be up to her. I didn't have to be there (frankly, I felt I had been there throughout our mother's life).

I put the ashes away on a shelf in a closet and waited. A few months passed. Gigi eventually e-mailed me that she'd decided she was not coming west any time soon, nor did she want to take over this responsibility; she said I should just go ahead and take care of scattering the ashes sometime this summer. I told her I would. And I let her know the date and time I would be doing it so she could observe the moment however she chose.

The chosen beach is where my mother hung out in her beautiful, glorious youth; she and my father conducted a lot of their courtship there. It is the beach where I learned how to swim, on a family vacation in 1962. It's the beach where Gigi crossed paths with a huge Dungeness crab while wading, and screamed her head off - while our maternal grandmother waded out to her, caught the crab with her bare hands, and cooked him for dinner. This beach is where my father's ashes were scattered. Now my mother has joined him.

You can't scatter the ashes of the generation before you without a keen awareness that you are next up. The knowledge that our lifetimes are incredibly finite and quickly fleeting presses in. One moment I was three years old and learning to swim in that ocean. In what seems like the blink of an eye, I am 51 and scattering my mother's ashes into that same surf. One more eye blink and I will be within range of being dust myself.

I think my job in life right now is to figure out what I want to be, what I want to do, what I want to have, before I become dust. I am not talking about a "bucket list" so much as figuring out a path to the crematorium that is not paved in regrets.

Todo bien. (It's all good.)