Mineral

It came to me in the night when I could not sleep, about the ashes.  Marlou, post-crematorium, now resides on a shelf in my pantry.  And I, in decades or weeks, will do the same.  And the puzzle of all this only unfolds through process of elimination.  The moment the hospice nurse said that was it, that breath was the last, the person propped up in the bed, head hanging, eyelid sagging, became something else.  Because I cannot say what that something is, I am left with what it is not.  Marlou was never threatened by decomposition, until one instant in April.  And then she was in a freezer.  And then she was in a fire.  And now she is on my shelf.

It is the stuff of black humor, the person in a box.  The ashes in the pantry.  And when the ashes, or thoughts of ashes, came to me in the sleepless night, it was their essence that intrigued me.  I recalled how they have a ritual purpose.  Ash Wednesday, when churchgoers emerge with a charcoal dot on the forehead.  African tribesmen with ritual ash-whitened bodies in some National Geographic.  That's all I know.  Lying awake at night, the other thing I know is that we are supposed to move from ashes to ashes and from dust to dust.  But I don't believe in the dust.  I believe that dust is a euphemism, an evasion.  We move from the circulatory and robust to the rotting.  The ashes offer, I suppose, a less disturbing course of physical dissolution.  As a home gardener, I am all for the rot.  Why not save on compost?  I can believe in my reincarnation as a butter leaf lettuce.

As for the ashes, their ritual uses still baffle me.  It is 4 AM.  What is clear is the substance, gritty and mineral.  Animal, vegetable and the other.  Ashes, ground rock, the antithesis of cells and mitochondria and peristaltic action.  This is hard, cold stuff.  It doesn't care about weather or vacuum or acid or alkali.  It does not give a flying fuck.  It can be bombed, strafed or exposed to airline security.  The essence of the inorganic, as coldly, immutably permanent as anything.

When I stare at the plaster ceiling, a close cousin of the ashes in the pantry, I see the sense in changing the subject through a choice of materials.  Let's think about lime and gypsum and sand, even some asbestos.  Stuff that's hard, elemental and eternal.  Which raises an interesting question.  Would Marlou's ashes pass EPA inspection?  What is in there?  Haven't we all absorbed enough lead and mercury and strontium 90 to make us essentially toxic?  And the thought is not only deeply irreverent, but profoundly irrelevant, and yet at 4:30 AM, it occupies the mind.  

Life, whatever it is or was, can hold itself together with a certain excess of heavy metal, it seems.  We can be up to our eyeballs in bodily pollution, yet our cells can maintain proper discipline, march in formation, hold hands and remember their purpose as hair follicles or pancreatic ducts.  So why do some forget?  Why do some refuse to cooperate?  What is death and life and cancer and health...and why is it 4:45, dangerously close to 5:00, the hour at which the functional morning can be said to begin?  It's enough to make one turn on the radio.  Which I don't.  I stare at the mineral ceiling.

Is this a sign of a decadent culture, that I fixate on the material elements of death?  It seems for the moment, all I have, a starting point.  My instinct leads me here.  For now, it's what I know.  Just as I know that Marlou would want me to spend some time with her nephews this summer.  They are great guys, they have her DNA, and the biochemical path leads there...and then peters out.  The future seems frighteningly empty.  So, for the moment there's the ceiling, and later in the summer there's the nephews.  Tomorrow and tomorrow.  Meanwhile, virtually the day after tomorrow, there's the trip.  I can't get into it.  

Travel was something I did with Marlou most enjoyably and don't want to face this prospect alone.  It brings me back to older, lonelier parts of my life.  Or it seems to, with my field of vision dominated by an apartment ceiling in California.  Soon enough I'll be looking at departure screens and nervously pulling my passport out for the eleventh time, just to make sure it hasn't expired.  And I haven't expired.  There is an expiration date, and this fact could not be clearer, and once we are pulled from life's shelf it doesn't matter if we end up in my garden or the landfill or a crematorium smoke stack.  People can look at all my uncompleted drafts and see what a bad writer I really am.  It's all going to be revealed, and by that point it's all going to be chemical and not matter.  Still, matter does matter.  I can't work it out.  But something is working its way out.  And this time next week I'll be making my way out of New York Harbor.