the cardboard box by annie howell-adams

In the days following my mother’s passing, a celebration of her life took away some of the stinging hurt and confusion I felt. People gathered at her best friend’s house with flowers, hugs, and stories. They all looked at me with compassion and sadness.  Being older, nobody thought my father would out-live her. She was 56 and he, 70. The celebration of my mother’s life, really, was for his benefit, to ease his pain. It was my first memorial.

Twelve days later, at 5 o’clock in the morning, the phone shattered the quiet at the cabin. My brother was on the other end. 

“You’d better come down to Seattle, get on the next ferry, Harry has died.” I heard his words, but it was shocking, I was in disbelief.

“He fell in the night, He had a heart attack.” 

My brothers and I sat around the table, nobody knew what to do. No one came. There were so many things to consider, to think about, but I wanted to suspend time. Life cleaved into two periods, the time of Before and the time of After.

What were we going to do?  There was the house, a house full of life’s accumulation, clothes, books,  my mother’s Royal typewriter, stationed in the kitchen next to the phone, next to the little terrarium, next to the sink, next to the toaster, next to the coffee pot.

It was quiet in the house. Both my brothers had girlfriends at the time, but I was alone. There wasn’t anyone to lean on, except my memories and my brothers.

Who was I then? I was just a kid, a student at university,  I didn’t know how to function in the world, I didn’t even know how to write a check. With my father’s sudden death, right after my mother’s, it felt as if a trapdoor had opened, and I fell into a well of darkness. Grief’s depression didn’t settle in, like a wet Seattle November, until months after my parents died. Relief only came when I slept. I could dream, dream about life, in the Before. Waking up, reality slapped me across the face.

Who was I then? All I had was an incomplete guide, a road-map, of the things that I had been taught, to revere and value. Sometimes in the evenings, my father and I would sit around the table, reading the news of the day. I still read the comics.  He read the headlines and kept up with the New York Times.

“Don’t ask him about the Stock market, advised my brothers,  or you will be there for hours.”

I was trying to figure things out. “Dad, I asked,  is independence a good thing?”

“Actually, he replied, “It is the only thing.” This was my framework of who I was then.

In the spring after she died, I picked up my mother in a box from the funeral home next to the 318 Tavern. The box was small, but heavy. That made sense, my mother was weighty, consequential. I put the box behind the driver’s seat of my Volkswagen square-back. We drove across the Lake Washington Bridge the way she did every morning on her way to work at the Seattle newspaper in her blue Karman Ghia. My mother was a silent passenger with me, as I adjusted to a new life, life without my mother, life without her insights and her wicked sense of humor. Once she went back to work, it didn’t take long before she was promoted to Editorial Page Editor, a position she was perfectly suited for, with her knowledge of politics, her love of writing, and being a woman who could function and excel in a man’s world. When her paper decided to endorse Nixon, she refused to write the editorial, she stood her ground, believing in her own principles. No one ever beat her at Scrabble, she was famous for her seven letter words on a triple word score.

One of the last things we did together was attend a classic music concert. She was raised in a household of music, her father was a concert violinist in San Francisco. She kept his violins under her bed, for years after he passed away, keeping a part of him close to her.  We held out our hands side by side as we listened to the music. Hers was a hand that had lived. Mine was youthful, and smooth. We looked at our hands side by side, mother and daughter, listening, soothed by the music. After she died, I listened to one of her records over and over again, the achingly beautiful Bach double violin concerto in D minor. The music was able to express my feelings of loss, emotions that I didn’t have words for, emotions I didn’t understand.  

Before my mother died of cancer, she told me that she had nothing left to teach me. It seemed a curious thing to say at the time, but in reflecting on her words, it had the effect that we had completed our journey together.  At only 19 years old, I didn’t understand the finality of cancer. I didn’t know that how a person dies, can leave us with peace or regrets.  I saw as time passed, that she did not want me to suffer regrets and I didn’t, until my son was born.  I have sketched out a large painting where the two of them are sitting at a table playing cards together.  I have not painted this image yet, but I hope they can meet on a canvas. It is surprising how similar they are, running ahead, full speed in life. My son likes words and music too.

I waited all summer to let her go.  I took the cardboard box of ashes to a point of land at the southern tip of the island, watched over by a lighthouse. The outgoing tide moved salt water across the Straits, to the Pacific Ocean. This was where my mother belonged. The sparkling sun glittered like diamonds, the beauty of the moment confirmed that this was the right place.

I placed the box in the water, in the river of outgoing tide, and said goodbye. I didn’t want to see my mother as a pile of ash, like scoops of gray dust from cleaning out the wood stove. Would there have been bits of bone, a tooth, or her cancer as a hard moldy ball? The tide took the box and moved it quickly towards deeper water. But then, I saw my mistake, it was too late. I couldn’t reach the box. It was floating.

How could this heavy box be floating? Plastic, the ashes were in a plastic bag. My mother was going on a final journey. The cardboard would saturate with water, water would seep into the plastic bag, the box would sink, the tape would unstick. Creatures would gather to inspect the box of my mother’s ashes that sank to the depths. The flowing tide would tumble the box across the bottom, carry it out, and then eventually my mother would disperse, dissolve, and flow into the sea. 

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Annie Howell-Adams is a writer, painter, and adventure seeker residing in Washington’s San Juan Islands. You can follow her work via her Instagram page: @anniehowelladams123