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Burial at Sea
There is no easy digging on the island of my wife’s childhood. Inches below the topsoil it’s alluvial coral, bleached white and bouldery. You want a grave, even for a body reduced to five pounds of ashes, to be dark and easy. I could have buried the bodies in the backyard, hauled out a pickaxe and had at the ground, but it would have been a long, sweaty labor.
We’d also been cleaning house for days and greasing the work with smoothies made from mangoes off the backyard tree and a heavy pour on the rum. My wife’s mother had finally been committed to a memory care facility. When one puts ‘finally’ in a sentence, there’s always a backstory. This one involves hoarding.
Five hundred pairs of shoes, no lie, most never worn. Decades of Home and Garden Magazines. A Dollar Store worth of Dollar Store stuff. The usual things one finds with hoarders.
The first body was Thomas, one of my mother-in-law’s favorite cats, who’d been cremated and interred in a carved box from Pier One and then shelved in the living room. He sat below a shelf-bending row of Modern Architecture ‘83-’92, next to porcelain cats in play, a dusty tasseled lamp, a tea set, a knock-off Lladro ballerina, a tiny basket.
My wife’s mother had had a cousin — Poor Bill, we called him, derisively. He’d shambled his life, de-closeted at 50, badly. His wife and kids, not liberated, not happy…
