The Fertile Crescent

Crescent City, California (my birthplace) is a hell of a place to contemplate mortality. Just outside of town resides a collection of some of the oldest living creatures on the planet; trees that, despite the best efforts of humanity to tear them all down, tower over their surroundings like narrow wooden skyscrapers. On the other edge of town lies the Pacific Ocean, steadily pounding the offshore rocks into dust.

It was one of Crescent City's beaches I went to alone on the day before my grandmother, my last living grandparent, died. It was the same beach I went to when my uncle died, some years ago, and it is the same beach where I want the ashes of my body to be scattered. The beach doesn't hold any particularly strong emotional memories for me, although it is the first place I remember encountering a corpse--the washed-up body of a sea lion that attracted my attention at first because it looked like it was still alive and moving, though this movement turned out to be the burrowing of what must have been thousands of maggots into the sea lion's remains. It is an image I have never forgotten, and remains one of my strongest associations with that particular beach.

The reason I want my ashes to be scattered there is because it is one of the few places I have ever been to where you can feel truly alone, as we all are at the moment of death. Alone, despite the beach's location near a major interstate, a hotel, a seafood restaurant, and innumerable tourists. Alone, despite the often dozens of people (surfers, walkers, campers, children, dogs, hitchhikers, junkies) that can be found wandering the beach at any given time. As anyone who has lived near the ocean knows, the incessant and hypnotic crash of the surf can drown out as much of the outside world as you might wish, in much the same way (though perhaps less voluntarily) that death does.

At some point during my walk, I sat on some errant piece of driftwood and stared at the surf, the gulls, and the setting sun for what seemed like hours. The wind was kicking up sand, driving it into the surf and into my face. I like the thought of my dust getting into someone's face, or some kid's castle, or some rotting sea-lion's corpse. It seems like a tolerable way to spend eternity, though the beach's very existence is testament to the sad fact that nothing is eternal, not even stone or land.

My grandmother left specific instructions after her death: no epitaph, no burial, no service, no memorial, no stone. She wished to be cremated and have her ashes placed beneath a blooming rose.

I will write more about her later, but let me say this now: she was one of the strongest women I have ever met. When I held her hand days before her death, it felt like a piece of bark from a redwood tree--soft, damp, easily torn. But the woman I knew in my childhood seemed as unyielding as the offshore rocks or the thick trunks of those redwoods.

Though I was born there, Crescent City is a town that has beaten many people. Though it has many charms, it is not a particularly forgiving locale. And this week, as I watched the sun bleed into the ocean and the sand being battered and whipped by surf and wind, for the first time, I felt like the town had beaten me. I don't think I'll be back for a while.