Sturgeon food

15

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In August, just weeks before I pack up the maroon mini-van and drive west to Colorado College, mom, Eric and I decide it’s time to release dad’s ashes. It’s mom’s 49th birthday. Fré Donne — free the woman. We collect fallen branches and yard debris and drag them down to the rocky shoreline below our house. Eric helps us pile it as high as his head—a funeral pyre for the gods. At sundown, he drowns it in gasoline, throws a match and flames eat up the last light in the sky. Bonfires are a favorite summer ritual and a handy way to get rid of all the tree and shrub debris of the season but this time there are no marshmallows and beer. None of us really know how to do this but somber seems like the appropriate mood.

While sparks dance around our heads, we drag a mostly-neglected canoe onto the rocks and into shallow water. Mom wanted this canoe for her 40th birthday, imagining countless, orangsicle-sky summer evenings where she and dad would paddle into the depths of Winnebago. These purchases rarely match the fantasy. I can count on one hand the times we hauled it into the water, mostly opting for the ease and weightlessness of flailing limbs careening off the end of the dock.

Tonight, we are glad to have something to haul. The slow weight of it pressing down on our shoulders is right. Tonight, this ancient shape will carry us, and what’s left of dad, into the rippling shadows of Winnebago. As we paddle away from shore, the textures beneath us shape shift from flickering, vibrant orange, to creamsicle pink, purple, and eventually black.

When we are well past the sand bars and certain that dad’s ashes won’t wash up on our neighbor’s shore, we lay down our oars and sit. Mom is in the stern, Eric in the bow, me in the middle. The bonfire is a distant blob of light and our navigation home. We sit for a long time in silence, letting the canoe drift and sway. The water is still and we could conceivably sit here all night without ever drifting back to shore. Below us, prehistoric, scaleless sturgeon wonder about the shifting black shadow above them. Dad’s remains won’t be the tasty snack they anticipate. I am haunted by these giant fish. The word fish hardly describes their unearthly presence. Aqua Dinosaur? Limbless Water Torso? During winter months, when the entire lake freezes over, ice fisherman drive onto the lake, set up shanties around 4x4 holes and wait. Spears and beer are requisite. Every spring, at least one of these vehicles doesn’t make it off the ice in time and becomes curious architecture for bottom dwellers.

I hear the crinkling of a plastic bag as mom lifts dad’s ashes from his cookie tin home. We didn’t put him in there. He arrived from the crematorium this way. It will forever be the most absurd association I have with death. Buttery English biscuits and dad’s crushed bones.

Mom puts on her therapist hat—doing her best to help us navigate the innavigable—and suggests that we say something about dad before tossing him in handfuls into the lake. “Share a quality of dad’s you will always carry with you.” I comply but only because that’s what I do. I please. My own way of grieving is lurking somewhere on the bottom of the lake with the sturgeon and I don’t dare go near this uncharted territory.

Eric takes to the assignment with sacred gusto as he tosses a handful into the lake, saving the last 1/4 teaspoon for his mouth. I can’t see anything so I don’t know if he swallows but he tells us later that dad is now a part of him. How can I beat that?

Are there tears on the canoe ride? I don’t remember. Nor do I remember dad’s qualities we promise to keep alive. Does it feel strangely ordinary? Or completely surreal? I lean toward the banal in my memory, thinking that I should be feeling more but I am mostly numb. I go through the motions of grief but I don’t dare actually grieve. I am a kid again stubbing my toe around the perimeter of the house. I concluded a decade ago that pain hurts and now I’m getting a real, moment-by-moment opportunity to feel the stabbing pain in my heart and let it be ok, to feel its intensity and not run. But it’s too overwhelming. Instead I shove it into the familiar glacial mass in my belly where it is always winter. I join the sturgeon under the ice and avoid the spear at all costs.

Lake Winnebago bonfire sky

Heading to college two weeks later is probably not the best idea. But the plan is already in place and I’m functioning on autopilot. I declare my major during the first month of classes — Biology/Pre-Med. If I become a doctor, I will be close to dad. He will live through me. He will talk to me. He will help me during every turn because I have chosen his path.

Freshman year is a hazy blur. I stalk a classmate when I learn at orientation that he, too, has lost a parent and loiter in his dorm room with nothing to say. He is always kind, the way you’d be kind to a stray dog with mange, and lets me sit on his bed while he and his buddies smoke weed and listen to Chemical Brothers. I am so distant from my own pain, from myself, that my presence likely puzzles him. I don’t want to smoke, I don’t want to drink, I don’t want to make out. I just want to sit in this human’s presence who maybe, just maybe, can sense the life-force longing to surface.

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