UnChristmassy thoughts

 When I was a pretentious youngster, I loved a poem from The Tempest that was in my sister's Oxford Poetry companion, likely a gift from my godfather the English Professor and family. 

Full fathom five they father lies

Of his boines are coral made

Nothing of him doth fade 

but doth suffer a sea change, 

into something rich and strange. 

Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell 

Hark! I hear them now - 

Ding dong! Ding dong dell. 

I remember the rhyme, just not the punctuation... 

I was just thinking of my mother's wish to have her ashes scattered at sea. My sister brought some back to California and scattered some there  - in a spice jar. She underestimated how much ash a person makes, it seems. 

I hope that doesn't stop my mother's ghost from having peace, but she wanted to be dispersed on the waters. Maybe we eventually spread, in homeopathic distillation, all the way around the oceans of the world. 

Could I go to the beach to have my mother wound healed? Sigh.

 I, an earth sign, wanted a grave to visit. Me, I wanted to be buried in the earth, and feed the trees. Now I'm worried I won't get it together to finance/organise it - someome just told me a cemetary plot is twenty grand. Twenty grand! 

Better an illicit scattering. I just hate the thought of going into the fire. I mean, so does being buried alive, but not being buried dead. Dunno why wormy flesh is any less scary than roasted.  Bleh. 

Anyway... my train of thought led me to the idea of the ashes of my mother spreading slowly over the bay, reaching Dublin, reaching Bray, heading to the horizon. Being part of the sand and shifting siltily with the tide and storms. 

She once, in the middle of one of my father's explosions (I don't know what euphemism is appropriate for his rage fits, really) that threatened to turn violent (I heard her shout Don't You Dare! and slam out of the house into her car), planned in the moment to get into the car, drive to the beach and swim until exhaustion took her beneath the waves. So she told me after - what happened was that she made it to the driveway, and the engine cut out. She calmly told him he'd have to get the car moved if he wanted to be able to leave and went back inside. I think she considered it a divine intervention of some sort. 

Anyway - perhaps that's how she imagined death - a slow sinking into the cold water, where she'd become one with the sea. 

I read this beautiful story the other day. I really want to believe that something of us exists, happily, after we die. I don't know why. Oblivion would be simpler, really. I worry if we do endure, then there's no reason why it wouldn't also be bad, a trial, stressful, with bad people there. A reward, a paradise - those are human hopes and creations. But... 

One of my Uncles had stage 4 Pancreatic cancer. He was a tough guy and didn’t trust hospitals so he didn’t see a Doctor until it was way too late, despite being in debilitating pain. When he did, the prognosis was grim, he had maybe six weeks left and Pancreatic cancer is a painful way to die. He decided to get MAiD instead. Medical Assistance in Dying, which is legal in Canada.

On the day we were all gathered around his bed, all the paperwork and permissions were sorted out and the syringe of d***s was connected to his IV. He was heavily sedated, but he has to be the one to push the plunger, which he did with the help of his wife. He closed his eyes and his breathing got very shallow and slowed down. After a few minutes we thought he had passed.

We were all standing around him, some saying goodbye, a lot of people were crying. About 10 minutes passed and people started to leave when suddenly, in a strong clear voice he said, *”Russell, wait for me”*, then he was gone. Nobody knew who Russell was, and it was kind of a mystery we talked about from time to time.

Years later his wife passed and when his kids were going through her things they found a very old photograph of him when he was maybe 5 years old. He was in a sandbox with a small dog, on the back of the picture in faded ink it read ‘Russell, 1944’.