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.

The Seriously Crooked Way Of The Middle, Before The Cracking Of The Skull

In the last year, I have participated in a disproportionately high number of funerals, burials, shiva sittings, memorials services, gravestone unveilings, baby showers, baby namings, christenings and landmark birthday celebrations.  It has been an overwhelmingly busy year and frighteningly indicative of life at the middle.  Here, I am unfortunately, not referring to the Buddhist Middle Way, but rather to the lifestyle lived by the middle aged middle class, in middle America. The specter of this monster has always frightened me to the core, if only because I am accustomed to dancing a gentle waltz between extremes. I do not favor straight lines, and it has always seemed to me that to mediate the middle road, one must navigate in relatively straight pathways. Yet at this point in my life, I find myself unmistakably in the middle of the middle. How did I get here? I see those around me dying, the other half being born. I find myself thinking about safety, about prudence, about providing for and optimizing livelihood for the next generation. It's a new and strange feeling. Birth and death rituals are important in every culture, as lives leave us and as we welcome new lives into our tribal circles. Our views about human existence expanding all the while, bearing witness to the nature of this complex journey. The middle is a crucial point at which there is still time to turn back and change our choices before proceeding further. My father suddenly died last year. He was diagnosed with late stage lung cancer and passed away within 2 months of his diagnosis. He lived a middle class life punctuated by dramatically radical decisions, that in summary, made his life less than ordinary. The closer we come to one another, the more clearly we are able to see the small and large actions that make a life extraordinary-- all of our lives. My father did not get to live into old age. This seemed to me a great loss, not only because I miss him terribly, but because the integrity of his being was so transcendent--something to be maintained and nurtured as we age. Something, that I hope he passed on to me. At this middle point of my life, I have come to the humble conclusion that everyone's life is in fact, quite extraordinary. Our small actions are large, the actions we perceive as large, sometimes in fact, turn out to be significantly small.

During a trip to the sacred river Ganges a couple of years ago, we stayed at an inn a short distance from the burning ghat. Day and night the fires that consumed extinguished human lives lit up the view from our balcony.  I felt an irresistible fascination with the burning of the bodies, the smoke rising to the skies, the unmistakable scent of burning human flesh. I could still recall that scent, which six years before had for weeks lingered in the air of our Brooklyn neighborhood after the attacks on the WTC towers.  My child was still a toddler then, and I feared for the damage to her developing lungs. Yet, I wanted to breathe in that scent, keep it near, as a reminder of what we are and of how easily it is all consumed into the ether. Deaths and births are always unforgettable events. The lists of names and photos of the victims of the 9/11 attacks posted all over the city, carved a permanent folder of emotions and memories that will forever live in the consciousness of every new yorker I have ever known. To most of us, these people were strangers, yet we were all touched and deeply affected by their lives cut short, by their humanity layed open before our eyes.

The powerful Hindu custom of Kapalakriya involves the eldest son hitting and cracking the burning skull of the deceased parent with a large bamboo stick, during the last stages of cremation.  After the cracking of the skull, the son turns and walks away, never looking back. The symbolic spiritual purpose of this ritual act is to help release the soul of the deceased parent from its entrapment in the physical body.  From an outsider's point of view, and therefore, a less religious and more psychosocial perspective, I think that it is something more. What if the secondary role for this practice is that of forcing the mourner to a definitive severance of all connection and attachment with the physical identity of the parent?  I believe that it is not just for the sake of the deceased that we crack the skull, but for the benefit of the mourner, as well. For if we can detach ourselves from clinging to the physical representation of a loved one, we can hold onto that which is more ephemeral, but much more long lasting-- our relationship to that life, and its significance on the evolution of our own. 

There is no need to look back, for the substance of a life is but what is survived in those who have been touched by it. It is survived in the here and now of who we are and what we do in the world. Death and birth both have the power to awe. The magical appearance and disappearance act they perform always strengthening tribal ties, sometimes only temporarily-- but more importantly, often immediate and reliable at the time when it is most needed.  At this point in my life career, I am starting to consider that perhaps the middle is something to be celebrated, rather than feared or loathed.  It does, after all, confirm that we have survived the beginning-- a delicate and fragile undertaking.