10lbs Lighter
Waiting for my turn at the Spirit Airlines automated ticketing kiosk in the Fort Lauderdale airport, I watch a Jamaican woman remove a large bag of white sugar from her suitcase. She pleads with the airport agent before reluctantly dumping it out in the nearest trash can. It’s 4:00 a.m. I consider our own luggage heaped on the cart in front of me; I already know one of the bags is well over the allowed weight limit. Normally, in these situations, you can take something out—an expendable item, some clothing you won’t miss, a book already read. But this isn’t that sort of bag. The contents: a few family heirlooms and a box containing two separate bags of human cremains.
I’ve flown budget airlines enough to know how overpacking can turn out, have had bags ripped open and large fees extorted. This, however, is my first time flying with the deceased as contraband. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there was a standard acceptable procedure for transporting the dead until I’d thought to Google it that evening over dinner. By then it was too late to procure the certificates. Instead, I swipe my credit card, print out boarding passes, and hope for a miracle, though in my current condition, grace feels unlikely.
I haven’t slept in 24 hours and I have an earache. My anxiety mounts, but there is no direction now but forward. My mother follows behind, expecting me to handle the situation much like I’ve handled the past few days, always the one with the plan, the solution, the cool head. I play my part, but on the inside I’m screaming. I want to lash out at her, at anybody. What would it mean to throw my hands up, abandon these bags and run out the automatic sliding doors back into the humid Florida night? I could just leave, not look back, and release the weight of responsibility that I’ve shouldered since I was barely a teenager. But there is no one else to carry out the task at hand, so instead, I allow my mind to wander into the past.
My mother has an old recorded VHS of my grandmother standing next to her family crypt somewhere in the mountains outside of Schaffhausen, Switzerland. On it, she can be clearly seen pointing at her desired resting place next to her mother and father, reunited with family in death. She had come to this country for love after meeting my grandfather in Berlin during the Korean War. Always homesick for the Alps, she made a point of never taking American citizenship. To be buried in her motherland was a non-negotiable. Instead, almost exactly 20 years after her death, she’s about to be thrown roughly onto a conveyor belt and loaded into the belly of a plane in South Florida. Her presence in our luggage is a harsh reminder of our failure as a family to honor the wishes of our matriarch.
Her ashes came to us unannounced. My grandfather sent a box to our house some months after she had passed, the contents of which were a small ceramic lamp and a scribbled note with a casual salutation. The lamp, obviously obtained at his not-so-secret mistress’ lamp shop, was placed on a knick knack shelf and promptly forgotten as a wildly inappropriate gesture of goodwill. It wasn’t until I’d been assigned the chore of dusting some time later that the truth came out—I picked up the lamp to give it a once over with a rag and noticed that the collar wiggled. Curiosity led to a few more wiggles, and then a pop as I pulled the top off of what I quickly understood to be an urn containing a sack of what not long before had been my grandmother, Vreni Barbara Schlatter. The ceramic pink and white antique was a far cry from her family crypt nestled in Swiss mountains, and even at the tender age of 12, I had a sense that it cast a shadow over us.
A year and a month after my grandmother died, my younger brother, the baby of the family, was killed on Christmas Day when our Ford F-150 found an ill-fated patch of black ice on the way home from a ski trip. The rest of us—my mom, older brother, and I—all survived, but did not feel fortunate, no matter what anyone said. After saying goodbye to his broken body, kept alive for a day after the accident by the miracle of modern medical intervention, the hard decisions were made. His young, healthy organs were donated, and his body was sent back to our hometown to be cremated. He arrived home without any pomp and circumstance, packed by the morgue in a brown cardboard box containing a heavy plastic bag and an identifying label.
I sat with my mother and that box on his bed, the sheets unwashed since his death; a way to feel nearer to him in our grief. I remember my anger that he didn’t have a more appropriate vessel, feeling personally attacked by the audacity of the plain cardboard and its ability to hold a ten-year-old boy who had been so vibrant in life. The ashes were a mixture of fine and coarse. I watched my mother untie the bag. Here lies Ezra Samuel Travers, beloved brother and son, now a sack of chunky grey dust. She wet a finger in her mouth and dipped it in the bag. Ashes of her youngest son passed her lips and she looked at me with a defiant gleam in her eyes.
“What does he taste like?” was all I could think to say.
“Try,” she said. And so I did. And then we began to laugh, tears rolling down our faces. To have someone so abruptly hurled into that inaccessible space of forever gone is to lose all sense of decorum. Without sackcloth and ashes, permission to publicly tear hair and wail, you find your own peculiar ways of expressing grief.
We only buried a portion of my brother’s ashes, my mother unable to part with him completely. So he was added to our collection, to be carried with us from house to house and across state lines, always finding a place of honor on my mother’s bedroom altar. Once I moved out, she continued to carry them in this way, blurring the line between the living and the dead so as to not lose them to that void completely.
I snap back from my revery, eyes heavy with exhaustion under the fluorescence of the airport lights. I am lifetimes away from that 13-year-old girl with the taste of her brother’s ashes in her mouth, but she is easily conjured. At this late hour, I feel more like that young teenager grappling with puberty and tragedy at the same time instead of the 32-year-old woman I am. What will l say to the agent after she weighs the suitcase, opens it and discovers our secrets? How to explain that we are not like the rest of these nice people, headed home from their family vacations? I look around at the other people waiting in line and wonder if their baggage looks anything like mine.
We had come to Florida four days prior to bury my grandfather. He was not a particularly good man; I hadn’t spoken with him in years, unable to forgive him for the way he had treated my grandmother and mother in life. He was handsome and charming, but cruel, leaving his mark on the women who loved him. Still, if we could give a proper burial to the least deserving among us, perhaps there was hope for our family yet, maybe even a means to begin a new chapter in our handling of the dead, one guided by the comfort of established traditions. And so we purchased plane tickets, had strained conversations with long-estranged family members, and made the necessary arrangements to have him buried in his family plot in Florida.
After arriving on the day of the funeral at the cemetery on Highway U.S. 1, I parked our rental car and sat with my mother under the shade of a giant live oak. We didn’t say much. We’d gotten stoned in the car and she was wearing dark sunglasses. She hugged the ancient tree and I took a photo. My older brother joined us, pointing out the distant blue shade cover where the burial would take place. It was a long walk, so I waited until we could flag down a cemetery employee with a golf cart. Once we had a secure seat on the back bench, the driver took off at a surprising speed. We couldn’t help but laugh as we bounced past rows of tombstones, hanging on for our lives.
Upon arriving, we took a seat in one of the many rows of metal chairs neatly lined on AstroTurf and waited for the rest of the family to arrive. I took in the scene: large marble statues of the apostles guarded rowed generations of family I’d hardly known. These buried strangers had never fully accepted our particular branch as their own after my grandfather betrayed his good southern “blue blood” by marrying an already divorced foreigner. We would not be joining them here when it came our time to eternally rest.
Twenty minutes later, my aunt, cousin, and great uncle joined us, carrying a small wooden box full of ashes. No one else came, not a single friend or distant relative. As a man of God, it was up to my brother to deliver the service. It was awkward but heartfelt, and I was proud of him for standing in front of a broken family and rows of empty chairs to honor a man who had never done much for us. My cousin and great uncle also spoke, and then the box was placed in the ground. We all took a turn throwing a handful of dirt before the attendants finished the job. A laminated paper sign marked his place in the earth, as no one had yet managed to purchase a tombstone. As we walked away, I felt a strange sense of pride; we would not be adding to our collection this time. Here was one of our clan safely nestled in the ground.
After the funeral, my mother and I headed south to West Palm Beach so we could get to her storage unit before closing time. It’s packed with our old life that never quite recovered after so much loss: personal affects, old toys and clothes, and of course, the ashes of my brother and grandmother. The next hour was spent searching for yet another cardboard box, though this one packed carefully with love, full of photos, feathers, and other sacred items my mother has added to our family legacy along the way. It took us a while to uncover them, but finally, along with a few other items she couldn’t bear to leave behind, they were secured in the back of our car.
“Next.”
The voice of the woman behind the ticketing counter pulls me back to a harsh reality. Approaching her with an anxious smile, I hand over our IDs and boarding passes with trembling hands. I place the first two bags on the scale, one after another, knowing they are under the weight limit. She passes them to the attendant behind her. There is nothing left to do but weigh the final bag, our canvas crypt on wheels.
59.9 lbs. The red digital numbers flash with accusation and I prepare myself for the worst. In a few seconds of eternity, my mind runs wild. Dumping out the ashes into a trash bag as the line behind us and the ghosts of my grandmother and brother look on in disappointment. Me begging on my knees as my mother, not one to go down without a fight, is dragged off by TSA agents never to be seen again. All of the resulting headlines. All of our efforts to right the past dissolving like white sugar at the bottom of a trash can. The woman behind the counter looks at us, and I search her eyes for clues. Can she see through us? Do we wear this legacy on our faces? No Disney souvenirs or space saver bags with neatly folded sweaters for us. Our lives are made of messier stuff, comedy-tinged tragedy, the taste of ashes, and the kind of aliveness only found in such close proximity to death. We have no way to pass for normal.
Without a word, she passes the bag along without a mention of that extra weight, a smile on her face. My knees go weak and my eyes fill with tears, though I know she has no idea what her small act of kindness means.
“Have a nice flight. Thank you for choosing Spirit.”
“Thanks,” I say, trying to sound casual. I grab my mother’s hand and turn, heading towards security feeling at least ten pounds lighter.