When Mum asked me to finish Christopher Dryden’s memoir, I thought “Christ, I’ve got enough on my plate already, haven’t I?” What with Andrew slouching toward oblivion in a cloud of marijuana smoke; Doreen getting up the courage to demand a divorce; and me silently praying she’d just get on with it. The very atoms of our unstable family repelled one another with more-than physical force; the Vancouver branch of the Welland clan was disintegrating before my eyes.
And Mum wanted me to write some ancient forebear’s memoir?
She sprang this request on me just after we’d finished scattering Dad’s ashes on Skaha Lake. Summoning me into her bedroom, she led me to her walk-in closet and asked me to get what looked like – and turned out to be – an antique tobacco tin down from the top shelf. “Dixie Queen Plug Cut Smoking Tobacco,” the label proclaimed. I thought maybe it was a stash of Dad-memorabilia that hadn’t been disclosed to my siblings, which she was handing over to her favored son.
“That,” she said in her important voice, “is the unfinished memoir of your great-great-grandfather Christopher Dryden.”
Then she stared at me for a good long time as if I should have known what to do. And I did know, I suppose. Somewhere, deep within the muffling folds of my brain a sort of psychic depth charge went off, the heat and flash of its detonation transformed into a tingling sensation in the nerves. I wanted to hand the thing back to her and say “No way, Mom!” But how could I? We were standing in the sanctum sanctorum, surrounded by the rustle and scent of her clothing, by drawers filled with socks, panties and brassieres. I stood there, clutching the sacred vessel of my long-dead forebear, feeling like a dog caught crapping on the living-room carpet.
Damn you Christopher Dryden!
As a writer of sorts I’d experienced this kind of sinking sensation before, of course. The relatives of neurosurgeons don’t usually barter for favors on the unspoken understanding that their part of the deal will never materialize. Store owners aren’t expected to provision their kith and kin. But writers? It sort of comes with the territory – the expectation that you’ll be the chronicler of family history, the jotter of pithy cards, the guy who comes up with succinct material for employment forms and so on.
So Mum stared, her eyes watery with anticipation. And my inner resolve melted. I had vowed to never-again bow to people’s expectations. Nine-to-five was long enough at the keyboard. My off hours were dedicated to unspecified puttering about the house, the occasional game of golf or whatever the hell else I wanted to do. These banal activities weighed in the balance as it sank in, even before she asked, that Mother wanted me to ghost-write a dead man’s memoir.
I should have refused, but the tobacco tin seemed relatively light and compact, defying ‘no’ with its smallish dimensions. How could I turn down such a light burden, when my mother’s ancient hands shook as she thrust the box toward me, the sly old bird. Before I could anticipate what seeds of untold labour the little crypt might contain I found myself promising in a hushed, reverent tone to have a look at the stuff inside. I’d see what I could do.
Mom patted my arm, gave me a peck on the cheek and thanked me from the depths of her sorrow, as if what I was embarking on would put together the pieces of her puzzle. As if, somehow, my finishing Christopher Dryden’s long-lost memoir would make it easier for her to get over my father’s death, an event which I assumed we all thought privately had been a ‘merciful’ release.
Mom had taken it with her usual stoicism. That didn’t surprise me. Toward the end Dad became a shadow of his former self. He couldn’t drink anything stronger than an afternoon sherry. Puff anything more potent than Andrew’s second hand smoke. Fornication wasn’t even a memory...
What was left, for Christ’s sake, other than sitting day after day by the picture window in their living room, staring at the Mediterranean landscape off to the west, their hyper-defensive dog Sam curled up on his lap ready to snap at anyone who intruded on their dozy camaraderie?
I saw Dad’s elder years as a period of retribution – living purgatory, if you will, in preparation for a blank beyond. It confirmed my Epicurean abhorrence of heaven.
Don’t get me started.
His ashes had sat in a cardboard box up on that same shelf in Mother’s bedroom ever since his memorial the year before. It was a funny shaped vessel, sort of like an oversized Chinese take out carton, but much bigger and heavier. We all wanted to get some ‘closure’, as they say, but Mum couldn't make up her mind where to scatter the ashes. So they sat up there with the old scarves, and hats, and sweaters that nobody wears anymore – stuff that had been set aside and forgotten, including Christopher Dryden’s tobacco tin.
Every once in a while my sister Brenda would call. "What are we going to do with Dad?" she'd say. Mum and Dad had actually purchased plots years ago, but for some reason she put off the idea of interment. "I don't want him stuck in the ground," was all she'd say about it. "But Mom, he won't just be stuck in the ground! There'll be a service," Brenda argued. When that didn’t work, Brenda informed the rest of us that Mum needed a place where she could go and commune. Forest Lawn was too far away, too formal.
Why the hell did they spend all that money on plots down in Surrey then, when they lived 350 kilometres away in Pentiction?
Doreen made her usual snide comparisons between my screwed up family and her ever-so emotionally and intellectually evolved folks. When her mother died Doreen’s father Frank snuck into Beacon Hill Park and scattered the ashes in a little grove by a burbling brook, where he'd also purchased a plaque on a wooden bench. "Esther would have liked that," he said, and to hell with civic bylaws.
Actually, he accomplished the deed in shifts, bringing pockets full of Esther to her final resting place for scattering. It reminded me of the movie The Great Escape, where the POWs scattered dirt from their tunnel in the prison yard right under the noses of their German guards. Frank didn't send Esther’s ashes rattling down his pant leg, though. He transported her in zip-lock bags, which he emptied ceremoniously, then carefully folded and reused.
Like Frank, Dad had served in World War II – Dad as a bomber pilot. At one point I'd wanted to write a book based loosely on his life. This would have been a couple of years before his heart attack. I asked him to go with me to the Canadian Air & Space Museum in Toronto to look at a Lancaster bomber they have in their collection. But he always begged off. I thought it was his reticence about the horrors of war that held him back. Mum told me later that wasn't it at all: by the time I got around to asking him, a mild dementia had set in and Dad was afraid he wouldn't be able to remember anything about the plane, or how he’d flown it. He didn't want to go and gawk at something that had been part of his own history and not know an altimeter from a compass.
When Mum told me that, it was like she'd fastened a lead ball to my heart.
Anyway, something had to be done with Dad's ashes.
So I offered to scatter them in Skaha Lake when the family got together to mark the anniversary of his ‘passing’ – a term not allowed by the Canadian Press style guide, which insists that people, unlike gall stones, have to ‘die’ or be ‘killed’ or ‘murdered’ and so on. I broached the subject of Skaha with a salesman’s zeal, making it sound like Dad had always wanted to end up on its sandy bottom, within earshot of speed boats buzzing overhead and the thrashings of hyperactive kids tormenting each other while their parents grilled wieners on the beach.
Brenda, of course, immediately started telling me where the ashes should be dumped, how, and what sort of words should be uttered as Dad went over the side, and so on. “Don’t be so childish,” she fumed, when I told her she could paddle the god-damned canoe out on her own if she was so smart. “He’s my Dad, too, and I have a right to make sure things are done properly.”
Yeah. I could just see her out on the shore with a couple of those wands the ground crew use at airports, guiding me to the exact location where I was to jettison Dad’s ashes.
I’d brought the canoe along as my sacred barge. I also hoped Andrew and I could get in some paddling somewhere along the way. But he wasn’t interested. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck on a sixteen foot fiberglass island with his old man. I thought he might relent for the scattering of Dad’s ashes, but he gave me a sullen “no” when I asked, and I didn’t argue the point. So on the anniversary of Dad’s death I hauled the canoe across the sand at the east end of Skaha beach and put in, Dad’s ashes in the belly of my Frontiersman.
The canoe glided out onto the still waters. I kneeled to port, heeling her over so I could dip my paddle. The first two strokes I arced wide, swinging the bow to starboard, then I pulled straight back, flicking a little ‘J’ into the paddle and gliding. The physical sum-total of a man’s life – of my father’s life – sat there in front of me. Aside from his ashes what remained? The collective memories of me, Mum, Brenda, Collin and Mitch? memories that lay dormant in the thinking flesh; memories coded into the spiral ribbons of our DNA; memories in photos, mementos, the jumble of junk in the back yard shed. All transient things, whose meanings would be lost when our turn came to stop breathing.
Several friends have told me I should get rid of the old Frontiersman and invest in a Kayak. They laud the sleek profiles of their designer boats, which reduce wind exposure; the double bladed paddle, which balances one stroke off against the other; the buoyancy of a vessel that has sealed compartments at either end and a closed cockpit in the middle; and so on. But there’s no feeling of mastery to paddling a Kayak. I love taking out my canoe on windy days with a bit of chop and tide. If you’ve never balanced your own skill and power against the elements and achieved perfect equipoise, you won’t understand what the hell I’m talking about. But there’s a feeling you get when you’re paddling a canoe that just doesn’t happen in a kayak – a feeling that you are utterly still and the water is moving around you and the whole universe spins on a point centered inside your head. There is no other God than that. We are standing waves, eddies in the current. We die, then we’re done, but the tides still run, the sun rises and sets, Andrew will keep on breathing.
Two back strokes and the canoe stopped dead on the lay line between the park bench, where Mum sat surrounded by her offspring, and a little beacon at the end of the Skaha marina jetty. I’d sat her down earlier and pointed the marker out. “If you sit here and look toward that light, Mum, you will be looking over the spot where Dad’s ashes lay.” She hugged me and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Thank you.” she said. “You’ve always been the quiet one, always saving up your words to write them down.” The sensation of her hand on my neck is still with me. Her benediction caught me off guard.
I looked back from mid channel to the bench where they were all gathered around Mum. It was only a box full of ashes, for Christ’s sake, what’s left when a body’s been reduced to dust. But I wished I could think of a suitable prayer to add dignity to the act I was about to commit. Mum needed that from me. I unsealed the container and the plastic liner. Dad’s remains! How were they any different from the filtered contents of a built in vacuum?
“Fuck off!” I told myself.
Still, nothing of moment came to me. It was a carton filled with ashes and shards of bone. I poised it on the gunnels for a second or two, still hoping, then tipped the container with one swift motion.
Dad’s ashes formed a plume in the clear water of Skaha lake. And in that plume I thought I might have seen what he’d seen all those years ago over Germany and France. I thought I saw the dance of Shiva, and a million souls roiling in a mushroom cloud. “My God,” I muttered. “What a terrible duty you served, Dad. What awful bravery. Why did I not see that before now.”
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