A Final Journey With Mom

When my father makes an announcement, it usually comes after long and deliberate thought. He is 90, and although his legs are betraying him, his mind is active and alert. After a career as an academic, he weighs decisions carefully and completely. So when he told me he had decided what should be done with my mother's ashes, it was a decision cemented in thought, logic and certainty.

For the years leading up to my mother's death from cancer and in the three years since she passed on, the plan had always been to spread her ashes at the small Midwestern College where they had met.

Their first meeting is part of the family lore. While sitting on a front porch of the student union, my father saw my mother for the first time and announced to his friend sitting with him, "That's the girl I am going to marry." It was on their 62nd anniversary when my mother entered the hospital for the last time.

Now the plan for her ashes had changed. Over the summer, Dad decided that the remains should be scattered into the ocean off the coast of Maine. The place was where they had spent their honeymoon in 1941. Since I lived closest to the area, it would be up to me to turn my mother's ashes loose.

I was flooded with images as to how it would all go. Was it legal to deposit ashes in the ocean in that town? Would I be mistaken for someone covering up a horrific crime? Would people stare and point? Most of those visions ended badly. I would be in police custody and on national news. I kept telling myself that those outcomes didn't make sense, but the images kept coming.

The appointed Saturday came with an uncertain weather forecast. My wife, my daughter and I put all the requisite beach stuff in the car, along with two Tupperware containers holding the grayish powder that used to be my mother's body. A couple of nights before, my wife, who was extremely close to my mother, had unscrewed the box holding the ashes on the kitchen table and had transferred them to the containers. A little of my mom spilled out onto the table, but we agreed that she would have felt right at home there.