From Dust to Dust in a Little Blue Box

I am not a reader of biographies. One man or woman's story is as interesting, meaningful and/or powerful as the next person's.  I have never, therefore, seen the sense in reading some famous person's life story during the time I should be focusing on living my own story. Recently, however, I made an exception to my own tenet and decided to read a biography of Spalding Gray.  Spalding, one of my favorite contemporary writers/performers, ended his life a few years back, by jumping off the Staten Island ferry. It was Spalding's gift for insight & his unabashed ability to laugh at himself that I always loved.  One of his famous monologues, Monster in a Box, is a detailed, heart wrenching account of his failed attempts to complete a 1900 page unedited novel based on his own mother's suicide. The monster is the unfinished novel he keeps in a box, and which he realizes he cannot finish because he has never been able to resolve his mother's tragic death & abandonment.  Simply put, the monster is his mother's suicide; he himself is the box, which has contained all the grief of this irrevocable loss. When he too died an equally tragic death, I felt compelled to wonder if he had ever finally come to terms with his mother's violent demise. I couldn't help but to make the assumption that he had not, and that if he had, then perhaps things might have turned out differently for him in the end. It is important to proceed with caution where the dead are concerned...to walk and not to run.
Today I unpacked the box containing my father's remains. It is fairest to say "what remains of my father's remains"-- for in the end his body was divided in more or less four equal parts and distributed among his wife and children. My father was diagnosed too late. He had little time to plan and having always been a reasonably practical man, caught unawares he did not leave instructions for the disposal of his body. There were contradictory reports among family members as to whether he had in the past ever stated a preference for being buried or cremated. The majority in preference of cremation won out in the end. While three of the four parts have been laid to rest in various parts of the globe, the fourth now sits atop my work table in the uppermost room I call a studio.
Cremation is certainly the most expedient and least costly method of disposing of a body, yet so hygienic and informal that it hurts. Significantly more painful than the other alternative; I was surprised to discover. I now clearly see why the rituals surrounding death are so devoutly observed even among the nonreligious. It is really for those left behind that they have stood the test of time and the prevailing lack of genuine religious conviction. These rituals serve the purpose of buying time needed for goodbyes. This small powder blue box I have been holding on to for the past three years is my own monster in a box. I cannot lay my father to rest until I have done all I need to do to let him go. If only I knew what that entailed, I would have purposely set on that course. But mourning is complicated and delicate business; the sometimes subtle processes not always so easy to discern.
When we love someone deeply, they are always taken from us too soon. Though we had always said so much, there was still so much to be said. My father gave me all he had to give. I never doubted that I was loved. One thing he gave me was a love of words and language and of stories. Though I have only a handful of mementos that belonged to him,  I can still hear his legendary stories told in his own melodic and emphatic voice. I feel grateful for this auditory memory I didn't know it was possible to retain. For now, his stories do outlive him and will hopefully be remembered & retold by his grandchildren. Though I fear these too will eventually fade. Already his voice is only with me and in the translation from their original language, some important kernel of his stories is sure to be lost. Time has a way of shredding everything into increasingly finer segments, making dust of it all in its wake. So as precious as words are, they too won't last. At best, the ideas and teachings carried by fading words will find their place in the deepest crevices of the hearts and minds of his descendants.

I choose to put my faith in photographs and images and in the memories and stories evoked by these. Sometimes objects and stories make mutually precious companions. Such is the case of a small pewter sculpture of the virgin of Cobre, which belonged to my father and which not unlike him, has traveled across three different countries in half a century's time, to rest in my little corner of Brooklyn. There is a story attached to this icon, a tale full of magic and superstition. It involves a soothsayer and my father as a young man learning about loyalty and responsibility, losing his innocence while his country and his own fate harshly and rapidly change. I remember the fear, awe and respect in his voice every time he confided this story. A level of fear and respect I've never had to know, but for which I'm sure there must be a very special word.

My father lived an eventful, exciting and overall, extraordinary life. Yet, his passing was excruciatingly painful, tumultuous and humbly unceremonious. I find this final lack of poetry unfathomable. It was a grand personal event, to which no one came--a last supper full of empty chairs. In the ending of Big Fish, when the main character Edward dies, all the significant people in his life and stories show up at his funeral. From the everyday family and friends to the fantastic giants and witches, they all have contributed something to the stories that make up his final story...and they are all present to see him off on his final journey. But some endings are not as just. Instead, they are cruelly dissonant. For my dad, there was no funeral, no end of life party. None of the characters show up in the final chapter. My father, having been a man of many lands, was far from home. Those who would have mattered were either already gone, or could not reach him to play their part. This is one of the tragedies of being an immigrant. In the end only I was witness to his last breath. Though for that gift I will feel forever grateful, the silent celebration of his life has been difficult to reconcile.
My intentions are to travel to India to place his ashes in the River Ganges, where souls are promised re-birth. India is a far and exotic destination, expensive to travel to and requiring sufficient journeying time. For the past three years, I have failed to make this pilgrimage, instead making my travels to other  less committing faraway places. I too need the time to say goodbye and so the blue box continues to sit atop my studio table.  Although he himself was not big on long goodbyes, I don't think my father would really mind all that much if I needed him around just a bit longer--if this were something he could grant me, which it is.  In fact, I think he'd probably be glad to stick around even in his present form, for as long as I needed him to. My dad was no hindu, but he was a deeply spiritual humanist who loved mysticism, as well as eastern philosophy and eastern religious traditions. I think that he might have appreciated the ritual of being taken thousands of miles across the oceans for the sake of symbolically being given a second chance. He would certainly understand being taken there by his first born middle age daughter who may still be learning that true stories end wherever they end, not where we think they should end. And most definitely, I do believe he'd appreciate the poetry of being laid to rest in the dirtiest and most sacred body of water in the world, where fantasy, superstition, religion and the mystery of the unknown & of the everyday, can peacefully converge.