HUMAN REMAINS
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Issue 16
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His ashes arrived yesterday in a cardboard box labeled HUMAN REMAINS. The letters were all in caps, over 3 inches tall. Impossible to avoid. It seemed almost sacrilegious. As if he was naked, his essence exposed. I knew the USPS was the only way to legally ship ashes, either human or animal, in the United States. No other service, not FEDEX, UPS or other courier can be used. That’s the law and it’s what the director of Lemon Bay Funeral Services told me back in 2015 when I had my mom shipped in a granite urn from Englewood, Florida, to me in Burlington, Vermont.
The law is not negotiable. It seems to be supported by commercial shippers despite the fact they lose a seemingly endless source of income. The USPS has specific guidelines “to respectfully ensure their safe handling.” I wonder what goes through the mind of a postal worker whose responsibility it is to get these last vestiges of what was a life to their destination. But it’s not a “final destination.” It’s more of an interim sort of thing, a dilemma that I now have. Perhaps I should have coughed up the extra cash to have him interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery, witnessed by those who knew him, but he’d already cost me, and I harbored a resentment that interfered with the energy it would take to organize such an event. Ritchie would’ve preferred his body be laid out to rot, naturally, somewhere in the wooded area surrounding Fresh Pond Reservation in Cambridge, the city he most loved and where he lived his entire adult life, save for a year spent on a radical artists commune just outside of Vienna, Austria. God, religion, spirituality or any notion of an afterlife were of no interest to him. They were also of little interest to me. Until now. Thunderstorms are moving in. The room darkens as I write this sitting in my kitchen that also serves as a make-shift office where I write and most recently have made tentative gestures towards making art again. The red, white, and blue Express Mail package from the Keeffe Funeral Home has been sitting on a table in my entryway for the past three days. It is unavoidable yet I avoid it. Writing his obituary the day he died was easy. I’d been writing versions of him and painting versions of him at various times throughout the 43 years we’d known each other. We met in 1983 and lived together off and on until I finally left him in 2011. It was a gut-wrenching tear-your-heart-out-face-to-face kind of leave taking. I knew I had to go. He stood frozen, immobile, nearly catatonic. Did he say anything in our last moments facing each other in the driveway of our now empty condo, swept clean for the new owners? The last bit of what we’d had were embodied in our dog, Jasper, who sat motionless on the asphalt halfway between us. His regal, German Shepard-like countenance acted as a magnetic pole, holding us in stasis. He was our most recent rescue pup. We shared a love of dogs. Almost inaudible, Ritchie choked on his words. “I thought you were taking the dog.” We’d barely spoken to each other these last few weeks. He tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. “Do you want the dog?” I asked, thinking he has nowhere to go and having the responsibility of a formidable looking dog would not make finding an apartment any easier. My heart was crumbling, not sure how he’d answer. I imagined he’d give in at the last moment. But he didn’t. He’d ignored the fact our home had sold and that we could no longer sustain our Cambridge lifestyle on my retirement income. Our mutual friend and fellow dog lover, Alka, had driven over to help escort Ritchie somewhere else. I had no idea where that somewhere else might be. Ritchie started to cry. I had never seen him cry before. “Yes…” he stammered. In that moment, Alka, who had not said a word but patiently bore witness to the death of our relationship opened the car door. Jasper bounded in the back and Ritchie slid into the passenger seat. They took off. Although I can clearly see this moment as if it had been the final scene in an Academy Award-winning movie, I can’t remember what I did next. I’ve always experienced life as an observer. I see and feel myself from a certain distance. Life is one long performance. For a short while in high school, I toyed with acting but early on I felt destined to be an artist. There was never really a choice to be made. It is what I am. There was a moment as a young, married mother, when that feeling of detachment, of observing myself from a spot high above from where my actual body was located was so acute it freaked me out. My mind completely separated from my body. It was during a period when the artist part of me was being subsumed by the demands of family life. I tried to explain my dilemma to my husband. He seemed perplexed, suggesting I was making something out of nothing and if I just focused on the job at hand, working with him at M.I.T. and caring for our young daughter, all would be well. He was an indefatigable optimist. But the discontent and feeling of detachment festered. I left him and moved into my converted loft/studio in the old wharf section of Boston five years after that discussion. Emotional distancing has allowed me to examine the stuff of life, chew on it, digest it and regurgitate it in some other form, just as I’m doing now, in words. Back then, when I literally lived with the art I made, that form was paint on canvas. My experience, my relationships, are stored in my slush pile of inspiration. For others, dwelling on life’s most traumatic events and relationships might be debilitating, leading to days, months, even years of grief or regret. I probably stayed with friends before taking the bus up to Vermont to close on the house I’d bought, thinking it was a perfect location for the two of us. Now it’s just me. There was an initial euphoria, an excitement, a sort of unburdening, the freedom of the unknown. I’ve always loved diving into the unknown. There is great possibility at the beginning of things. It’s endings that cause the problems. It’s the same with art. The nervous excitement every time I’d stand in front of a blank canvas and the thrill of slashing that white space with a brush load of paint, giving birth to something unrecognizable, but coaxing it into being is still with me but without an adequate studio, it is unrequited. He elected to stay in Cambridge. I might as well of moved to the arctic circle as far as Ritchie was concerned. After I settled in, I thought he might be tempted to visit. I made it known through mutual friends, that he’d be welcome, but his willingness to simply move on parallelled my own. We were really two of a kind. Once the reality of that became clear, I began a search for a new partner, which led to a string of relationships, some longer and more impactful than others. After Ritchie had his debilitating stroke in 2015, I returned briefly to help clean-up the meager evidence of his life lived on the edge of things. He never was a joiner, always the observer, like me, but unlike me he looked at the world through the cold objectivity of science. I am a performer in my own life. I need to be the first or the best. I want to hear the applause, get the acceptance, win the award, get the A’s. Second place is never good enough. To be ignored is the worst. In this we were opposites. Ritchie avoided competition. He could never do what was necessary to win, especially if he had to conform in any way, particularly when it came to earning a living or having to work for a boss. Authority was anathema to Richie. I took a different route, learning to manipulate any authority figure (usually a man) to get the desired outcome. I’d documented his stroke and the first year of the aftermath in essays that were published in various literary magazines. In experiencing milestone events, writing is a panacea, providing some clarity. He managed to live, albeit in an incapacitated state, defying all expectations, for ten more years. Today I warily opened that package. I don’t know what I expected. A ghost, a vaporous wafting, a sound, perhaps a groan? Inside the standard Express Mail shipping carton sat a sturdy, rectangular, nondescript forest green cardboard box, 8x7x5 inches, weighing about 5 pounds. I gingerly lifted it out reminding myself this was once the body of a man who weighed about 185 pounds in his prime. He was not involved with the usual manly-man sports; he did not have the aggressive drive required to succeed at football, baseball, hockey or basketball. He admitted to having run in ten Boston Marathons and modestly confessed to have “only completed six.” His legs were powerful. Stocky thighs, muscular calves that came in handy since he walked everywhere and like me, he had no driver’s license and also like me, never owned a car. It was one of those quirky things we shared. Those same legs drove him to distraction in the dead of night when his restless-leg syndrome would inevitably prevent sleep. I would sense him getting out of bed, and no matter the season or weather, pulling on his clothes and running shoes to jog up and down the hill in the Fresh Pond Reservation that was just across the street from our Cambridge condo until exhaustion set in and he would stumble home, often sleeping till noon. It was his offbeat circadian rhythm, perhaps exacerbated by a life spent staring at the glow of text on a computer monitor that started long before any of the rest of us even knew what a computer monitor was, that prevented him from ever having a normal-9-to-5 job like most other humans that make a living in our capitalist dominant society, a society that he refused to bend to even when punishment was meted out for his noncompliance. Noncompliance. He was one of those noncompliant young men who refused to go to the killing fields of Vietnam. He did a little jail time for that form of resistance. In his personal relationships, that might have been construed as passive aggression. I experienced it as immovable stubbornness. When I met him, he was still paying off legal fees he incurred in a case seeking visitation rights for his only daughter, Cheyenne. By then Cheyenne was a teenager. The case happened in the early 1970s. He had refused to marry the woman involved (she was his first sexual experience). It was she who introduced him to the concept of an “alternative lifestyle” living in an “open relationship” but her definition of freedom with multiple partners extended only to her. She did not tolerate any other women in Ritchie’s life and wanted the cover of a bourgeoise lifestyle and the societal acceptance that marriage offered. Besides, it’s also what her wealthy parents wanted for her. It’s a complicated story as most relationships are that involve children when the connections between the parents become frayed beyond repair. Marriage was no longer in the cards for Ritchie. He’d tasted freedom and anything less became intolerable. The woman in question won her case against him. It caused him deep pain which he buried but he went on to live without dreaming of revenge. His former partner never moved on and spent the rest of her life feeding on the corpse of their relationship like a zombie. I think she is still alive, living somewhere in Massachusetts. I wonder if she knows of his death and if it has supplied her with any relief or sense of closure. I assume she might know as I’ve been in touch with Cheyenne ever since the stroke when we met for the first time in the ICU at Cambridge City Hospital when it was unclear if her father would survive. Given his childhood experience with a noncompliant Mormon mom who plowed through a series of four husbands, having children (Ritchie was the oldest) with all but the last one, set Ritchie up for having little respect for the concept of the “nuclear family.” His tortured first sexual relationship opened the door to the joys of “free love”, a door he walked through and never looked back. Of course, anyone who has tried openly and honestly to live such a life, knows that the notion any love is free is unrealistic. There is always an emotional price to pay for love even if it is given freely with no economic transaction, no legal contract involved. Sex however is a different story. That is widely available both for free and for a price. Emotional attachments not required. For those of us for whom sex has always played an important role in establishing a connection with another human being, we understand the power of this tool when it is treated as a commodity. I’m trying to decide what I am writing about here. I don’t think it’s a tribute to this man I knew longer than anyone else, save for my parents and my own daughter. His death had been a longtime coming. He actually died in the ER in 2015 but with heroic efforts on the part of the medical staff at Cambridge City Hospital he survived, but he never again walked the city streets or the path around his beloved Fresh Pond. Maybe I’m attempting to judge what we mean when we talk about “the quality of life”. Who gives that life a value? To whom does it matter beyond the mind and body of the person living it? Ritchie was quite brilliant when it came to computer science and more than most of us, he lived inside his head. I am now at an age when many of the people I have known and perhaps loved, are either dead or close to it. I resist the urge to succumb to the nihilism that seems to have infected the very concept of humanness. Perhaps those letters, HUMAN REMAINS, are prophetic. That is all there is. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. I’m grounded in the here and now. My parents tried to foist religious training, Christian training, on me while ignoring all such beliefs themselves. I saw and felt the hypocrisy in that. I soon resisted all attempts at church going and so my philistine parents gave up. I think being truly religious demands that you have the capacity to feel and express love, not only for family and friends, but for the world, for life. It requires an energy for living. My parents always appeared to be tired. Never truly happy to simply be alive. They seemed to be on a path that was not determined by them, but they traveled it anyway, without question. So, what does a person do, a non-religious person, a person bordering on atheism, a person for whom art is their reason to keep on living, what does that person do with human remains? I don’t know. For now, that green cardboard box is stowed, out of sight, under my front hall staircase. Maybe that’s where it will stay. |
CYNTHIA CLOSE, armed with an MFA from Boston University, plowed her way through several productive careers in the arts, including instructor drawing and painting, Dean of Admissions The Art Institute of Boston, founder of ARTWORKS Consulting, and president of Documentary Educational Resources - a film distribution company. She now claims to be a writer.
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