Remains

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Remains” by Kari Redmond. Kari writes from Fort Collins, Colorado. She’s written two literary novels, This Story Takes Place in a Bar, and What We Let Go which she is querying to traditionally publish. She also writes short stories, flash fiction, poetry, personal essays, and travel articles. Her prose and poetry is published in The Colorado Book award winner, Rise: An Anthology of Change. You can find her personal musings and essays on her Substack. Aside from writing, her passions include attending music festivals, SCUBA diving, reading, and traveling. Her goal is to visit every country in the world. Grenada was her 71st country.

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You are traveling to Portugal to spread your mom’s ashes. There’s nothing particular about Portugal. Your mother isn’t from there. There is no family there. It is simply the first trip you will take ten months after your mother dies. Portugal has an ocean. The Atlantic. This is where you will spread your mother’s ashes for the first time.

Nothing outside you tells you that you are ready, but something inside you insists that it’s been too long, that if you wait any longer, you might never travel again. Spreading her ashes will be the reason you travel again. It will be the reason your life resumes after your mother dies.

No one else wanted the ashes. The battle you thought would ensue when you requested them never happened. Aside from the meager few your father placed in an urn in the military cemetery where he too will be interred one day, you now have all of the ashes in a very large, very tacky urn you’re certain your father chose.

You thought there would be a battle because you forget that the people in your family who remain are not sentimental like you. In fact, the evening after your mother died, your father told you he was fatalistic as you ate steaks at Outback. It was the only meal you shared in the two weeks you were all back in the family home waiting for your mom to die.

It would also be your last. You’ve not dined or spoken to him since. This is exactly how you thought things would go after your mother died—the estrangement from your father that you’d longed for while your mother was alive finally realized. Without her here to bind you to him, you are free.

The word confused you. Fatalistic. You questioned whether it meant what you always thought it meant. Could it possibly mean something else? You did not think it meant what he thought it meant. Later you looked it up, and even posed a question on social media to your friends about what they thought fatalistic meant.

It’s not that you didn’t know the meaning, more that you didn’t understand how your father was using it the day your mother died to explain that he would be ok. His wife was gone and he would be ok because he was ‘very fatalistic.’

You are not going to be ok. You’ve known your whole life that your mother was going to die. If things go right, parents die before their children. You were always going to lose your mother, so you, too, were fatalistic in that sense, but knowing she was going to die sure didn’t make it any easier once she had. You were not going to be ok, but you were going to Portugal to scatter her ashes anyway.

It is not the first time you’ve spread someone’s ashes. You’ve spread your best friend’s brother’s and mother’s ashes in every body of water you come upon in your travels. You and your best friend spent entirely too long getting long-distance drunk, discussing the best utensil with which to scoop the ashes from the giant urns to place into Ziploc baggies (this vessel was also discussed at length). Your best friend was the authority on this, having three urns before you ever had one. She declared that it was the plastic scooper from a Kool-Aid container that worked best. You didn’t ask her why she was still drinking Kool-Aid as an adult.

So you get a scooper from a friend who has kids, and you get your Ziploc baggie and Scotch tape and for the first time you scoop the remains of your mother into a baggie so that you can travel with them. This is how your best friend delivered her family’s remains to you so that you could spread them. No one wanted to send them in the mail.

Your best friend does not know that you are flying to Portugal to spread your mom’s ashes. Your best friend flew out for your mother’s celebration of life, and that was the last time you saw or even heard from her. Your desperate calls and texts to her unanswered. You lost your mom, then your best friend, and then a couple of jobs. You do not know why your best friend stopped talking to you and it kills you every day. The not knowing. But mostly the not having the best friend you had since the fourth grade.

So you are going to Portugal, and somewhere over The Atlantic you understand the anxiety and hesitation you’ve been experiencing leading up to leaving. When you land, you will not text anyone. Not your mother. And not your best friend. The comfort of knowing someone is worried about you is gone. Of knowing someone is waiting on the other side of the world to receive a text from you so that they can stop worrying, gone. No one knows where you are.

There are things that happen in Portugal that you don’t realize. Things that happen underneath grief. You are becoming who you will be forever after without your mom. Something about traveling, movement, makes it all real. Who you were directly after your mom passed is not who you are on this trip, is not who you are becoming.

You are a woman without a mother, without a best friend. You are a woman no one is worried about. You are alone in a way you’ve never been alone before. Traveling again is what solidifies it all for you. From now on, all your journeys will be pilgrimages, a way to discover who you are when no one is watching. Who you will become with everyone important to you gone. Always before, you’d been traveling with Mom back home, worried and wondering. You’d not entirely been traveling solo. You’d had a safety net. Now, in Portugal and forever after, you will be without it.

The thought is both terrifying and liberating. Your safety net is gone. As long as your mother was alive, no matter how old you got, she was still going to save you—pay your credit card bill till you return from your dream trip to Antarctica, send you money in Panama when you get robbed, convince you that you are exactly where you need to be. She is not going to save you anymore. From here on out, traveling will be solitary in a way you’ve never felt before. But that solitariness is not altogether unwelcome, more surprising.

It is The Algarve where you plan to spread her remains. You’ve researched this, a lengthy coastline dotted with private coves. You take a train from Lisbon to Lagos where you stay much longer than planned because even though it is already October, the weather is unexpectedly warm, making the beach inviting.

When your best friend visited and spread her family’s ashes in your river, the two of you picked sunflowers from a neighbor’s yard. You best friend scattered the ashes and tossed the flowers in after you took pictures. You said goodbye together. You liked that the flowers helped you follow the path of those gone too soon.

So you wander the narrow, cobblestoned streets of Lagos searching for flowers you might easily pull to bring to the beach with you. You do this alone, accepting now that you and your best friend could only follow the same path for so long, even if you’ll never know why.

You find some bright pink and white hibiscuses growing near a cafe and sneakily tear them from their stem. You walk with the flowers to the beach, find as secluded of a spot as you’re going to, given the weather in October in The Algarve.

You take out the baggie, fumble with the absurd amount of tape you used, the number of bags. You say what you’ve been preparing to say, may you be forever traveling, I miss you, I will always miss you, nothing is the same without you, I love you. Thank you for giving me your love of traveling. Thank you for sharing it all with me. You are used to the stream of tears that grace your face.

Then you say things you didn’t prepare, I’ll be ok, please don’t worry about me, you don’t need to worry about me. As you say them you understand that the words are true.

You toss handfuls of ashes into the water, followed by two flowers. You get pictures as the waves push the flowers and ashes farther out. You watch until you can no longer see the flowers. Until you know she is traveling.

Spreading her is a goodbye and a hello and a promise all at once. A goodbye to the mom who shaped your life, a hello to a new life without her, and a promise that both you and she will be forever traveling. You can do this alone because like all extraordinary tight rope walkers, you never really needed the net. It was just nice to know it was there.