When I learned my father was dead, I felt a queasy mix of sorrow and relief. The relief came because my dad’s last year of life wasn’t kind. Lewy body dementia took away key pieces of him -- his grasp of history, his ability to explain pretty much anything, his magpie acquisition of new hobbies and collections, his love of fixing and tinkering – and in return brought him confusion, paranoia and finally near-catatonic misery.
He wound up in a nursing home once my mother was no longer able to care for him. She visited him daily and would always ask if he wanted anything, and I don’t know which hurts more to remember: the plaintive way he’d answer “home” at the beginning, or the fact that near the end he rarely responded at all. Dementia, I came to think, is like death deferred: My father was gone, but there was a still-living body left behind to sit with awkwardly and smile at.
When my father finally died he was cremated and came home in a black plastic box with an envelope taped to its lid that listed its contents. Later, when I steeled myself to open the box, I found a clear plastic bag – about the size and weight of a small bag of flour -- that had been zip-tied shut and adorned with a little medallion from the coroner’s office, like a dog tag. I’d been warned that “cremains” could include teeth and fragments of bone, but there was nothing inside except fine, vaguely beige ash.
Somehow my father had become an object sitting on a shelf. I told myself that wasn’t him – that he’d slipped away long before -- and yet it was him, or at least it had been. This nagged at me in the puzzling year after his death, the year in which I kept being surprised by my own grief. It was a quicksilver thing that could ambush me anywhere and at any time: monkfish on a menu, Google Maps showing the name of a town once driven through, finding myself using the wrong screwdriver. One hour I would calmly discuss the fact that my father was dead, proud of myself for avoiding the usual euphemisms and evasions; the next hour some random, innocent association would knock me for a loop. Eventually I found myself addressing grief as if it were a mischievous companion: Oh, so this is where you’re hiding today. Good one! Didn’t see that coming!
For six months, the little black box sat on a shelf in the hall of what was now my mother’s house in Virginia – a subtle change in wording that gave grief more opportunities. When she decided to move near us in Brooklyn, the box became my charge, riding in a rented Penske truck from Virginia to Brooklyn and then on to my parents’ summer house in coastal Maine. (Oh wait, my mother’s summer house.) I wedged the box behind the passenger seat in the cab, where it wouldn’t be jostled, and debated whether I should take it with me when I stopped for the night. (I didn’t.)
My father had asked that his ashes be scattered in the ocean. That had been fine when the idea of him being dead was theoretical, but now I had questions. In the ocean where, exactly? The coast of North Carolina, where he’d been born? My dad saw his upbringing as something he’d shed – as a child, he heard himself interviewed on a local radio station and so disliked his southern accent that he trained himself to speak in the neutral tones of national broadcasters. So no, not North Carolina. New York, where my parents had lived when I was a child? He’d engineered our departure from there and never looked back. Florida, our next stop, had never felt like a fit for our family, and my mother had loathed it and eventually insisted on her own getaway. My father had died in Virginia, but I couldn’t recall his ever visiting the coast.
The logical place was Maine, where my parents had spent every summer. But the Maine house was miles from the ocean. I could have taken the little black box to Pemaquid, with its lighthouse, but we’d only been there once, for a visit that had lasted about 20 minutes until everyone admitted they were cold and would much rather be somewhere else.
And why the ocean in the first place? I suspect my dad chose it for two reasons. One was that an ocean burial smacked of Beowulf and the ancient sagas he’d spent decades teaching in his first career as a professor. The other was that he fondly recalled his time in the Navy, liking its orderliness and routine. But my dad rarely told Navy stories and never reconnected with a shipmate or attended a reunion. After the Internet made such things simple, I’d ordered a ballcap with the name and hull number of his ship, the USS Massey; he proclaimed it a great gift, but I have no memory of him wearing it. After he died, the hat went to Goodwill.
I think my dad saw the Navy as a critical piece of his reinvention from North Carolina boy to academic, writer and thinker on a global stage. It had taken him away from North Carolina and then from the U.S., expanding his world in ways he’d hungered for. “The ocean” was interesting shorthand for all that, but not much use in deciding what to do with the contents of that little black box. So it came out of the Penske truck and went onto a shelf in the Maine house, where it stayed for more than a year.
The Maine house is an uninsulated summer “cottage” on a hilltop overlooking the Sheepscot River. It belonged to Bud and Mildred Bronson, friends of my mom’s parents. Bud’s father had been a teacher at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and overseen the house’s construction as a summer getaway in the 1890s; Bud and Mildred first invited us there in the summer of 1980. My parents loved the house and became its unofficial caretakers, arriving every summer ahead of the Bronsons to clean, weed and take on increasingly elaborate chores, from repainting the porch to replacing 1920s-era knob-and-tube wiring. The Bronsons had no children; appreciative of my parents’ love for the cottage, they willed it to them.
The Maine house was where my parents were most at ease and most themselves. They’d decamp from New York or Florida or Virginia, first with our dog and later with an ever-shifting constellation of cats, and stay in Maine as long as their jobs and the weather allowed. While there they invariably tackled summer projects that struck me as some combination of tedious and unwise. One year my mom recaned several dining-room chairs, which were promptly stolen; another time they modernized the kitchen, a project that culminated with the two of them lying on their backs and using their feet to shove a massive cast-iron stove across the floor to its new location.
My dad spent his time in Maine looking for junk at antique shows, collecting books and assembling things -- paper models, plastic planes, and sculptures made of wire, wood or both. To name just a few of his projects, there was the man made from wire he’d engineered to sit on the railing of the porch, peering through binoculars at the river; the mermaid weather vane swinging to and fro in the yard; the Noah’s ark frieze in my son Joshua’s childhood room; and the miniature stone circle he dubbed Joanhenge in honor of my mother.
The Maine house is now full of intertwined family history: You’ll find Bronson family photos; the marriage bed my mother’s great-grandfather made for his daughter; furniture relocated over the decades from New York, Florida and now Virginia; college stuff of mine that washed up there and never washed back out; and Maine décor that my folks found over the years in antique shops and barns.
Many of the things in that house bear my father’s stamp. The Winslow Homer prints he loved dominate the dining room, his old watercolors and sculptures adorn the hall, and a squadron of model airplanes and miscellaneous flying machines patrols the living-room ceiling. My dad installed the glowing light switches he loved in high-traffic areas (a habit I’ve picked up, to my wife’s annoyance); added security lights and cameras; insisted every room needed a flashlight and a tape measure hanging from hooks; and ensured good airflow by outfitting doors with hooks and eyes to keep them open.
Since that first visit in 1980, I’ve spent at least a little time in the Maine house every year except for 2020. But it never had any particular hold on me: As a child I came because that’s what my parents had decided we were going to do; as a college student and a young adult I was more interested in excitement elsewhere than in sitting in the woods. My interest diminished further after I got married: My kid loved the house, but I’d get fidgety after a few days and start Googling what was happening in New York.
But two years ago something changed. Emily, Joshua and I visited and the slower tempo suited me in a way it never had before. I enjoyed pottering around restaurants and supermarkets and used bookstores, and started plotting improvements – an attic fan to make the upstairs habitable on hot days, screening part of the porch so you could sit outside without being tormented by mosquitos. To my surprise, after so many years of mild interest or indifference, I found myself happy there.
Part of that – probably most of that -- was that I was older and now appreciated a more relaxed pace. But it was also that I could feel my dad’s presence everywhere in the house, and sense his mind at work every time I navigated a household routine.
He was still alive the summer my feelings about the house changed, though no longer himself. In the Maine house, though, I could imagine he’d just stepped away for a moment. And the house made me recall everything I loved most about him: I could feel his playfulness in the outsider art he’d made, and appreciate his Boy Scout practicality and love of order in how shelves and drawers were organized.
One little memory: I needed to repair a mobile that my father had made in Virginia and I’d decided belonged in Maine. To do so, I needed a pair of needle-nose pliers and some wire that was thick enough to hold the mobile’s weight but thin enough that it could be bent into the proper shape and not look too ungainly hanging from the ceiling.
This would have been trivial for my dad. He would have known which gauge of wire was right and where to find it, and the rest would have been the work of minutes: a snip to the right length, a quick twist or two, and done. I was a poor substitute, but determined to make a go of it. And so I found myself searching through boxes and bins in the utility room, trying to think along with my father until I was having a one-way conversation with him. Where would you have put wire like that, Dad? With bits and bobs you set aside for future sculptures, or in a box filled with other wire? Is it in the utility room, or out in the woodworking shop?
I finally found the wire I was looking for, repaired the mobile with only a couple of false starts, and felt a deep sense of satisfaction after I hung it up and it didn’t fall. My dad would have done the job better, and certainly more easily, but it was done.
The year the little black box spent on a shelf in the Maine house came to seem less like a failure of mine and more like a part of the process. My dad, or at least this odd remnant of him, was on a shelf in the house he’d loved, surrounded by objects he’d made or collected. That wasn’t a permanent arrangement – too macabre, and not what he’d wanted – but it led me to the answer I’d been looking for.
I wouldn’t take the little black box to the ocean, but out onto the Sheepscot River. I knew just the spot, too: off the bank in Wiscasset, where a kayak would be visible from the dining-room table where my father had made or fixed more things than I could count. The river, in relatively short order, would carry whatever was left of my father the dozen or so miles past Edgecomb and Westport and Five Islands to the sea.
(I should note this is probably illegal: While it’s hard to figure out, given Maine officialdom’s laissez-faire attitude toward most everything, federal law says ashes must be scattered at least three nautical miles out to sea.)
One Saturday in August I rented kayaks in Damariscotta. I removed the plastic bag from the little black box and transferred it to my drybag, giving Joshua custody of a pair of snips to cut through the zip tie. Joshua and I drove to Wiscasset and launched our kayaks at the town dock, maneuvering under the US-1 bridge and heading upriver until we were in front of the building you can see from the dining room of the Maine house. I couldn’t see the cottage – it was lost among the trees that covered the hilltop – but I knew we were in the right place.
I extracted the bag, balanced it on my lap, and cut the zip tie. Joshua asked to say a few words, I contributed a few of my own, and then I held the bag just above the water and turned it upside down.
It only took a couple of seconds for the bag to empty. The ash made a surprisingly bright cloud in the water, becoming a shape that slowly twisted and turned, stubbornly maintaining its form as the currents tugged it this way and that. I thought about waiting until it dissipated, but decided not to. I’d done my job and the river would take it from there. It was time to go back to the house, to the place my father no longer was but always would be.