Dust to dust, ashes to alpacas

A train journey looking back at visiting Dad, newly widowed

‘Animals are the bridge between us and the beauty of all that is natural. They connect us back to who we are and to the purpose of why we are here’. - From The Animal Whisperer by Trisha McCagh

~~~

Fat windows with generous rubber corners look out on this grey day. My eyes attempt to focus on flashing images of houses, green winter crops and naked trees that merge into each other.

The signs that the country has been buffeted by constant rain are everywhere. Every green field has a puddle somewhere. Ploughed fields have zigzagged pools of silver splattered by huge tractor wheels. The trees on one side are poetic silhouettes enveloped in mist which has slunk between each field and on the other side, on the glass half empty window, the trees are soft green with mossy arms and shoulders. Dank green scenery is smothered by fog.

I was looking forward to my journey by train. Three women in front of me are sharing a table and two of them are tapping away on their keyboards. Both are busy but one has an annoying manner of clicking and tapping too efficiently. Then I briefly wonder how one can tap annoyingly. I conclude I’m probably being a bit unfair.

I was enjoying a seat to myself until a smart, thick woollen coated man gets on and sits next to me. He has a huge bag balanced on his knees. I feel sorry for him having to wedge himself between the arm rests but am thankful for them because without them I’d have been thoroughly squashed. On his lap, a large paper bag covered in hearts and inside a beautifully wrapped present in flowery paper sticks out over the top. I don’t have the nerve to tell him he’s blocked my view on my first, long-distance train ride in months.

I tilt my screen away from him in case he sees I’m writing about him.

Damn. I shouldn’t have drunk two teas for breakfast with Dad or the hot coffee at the station to keep me warm. I need a pee. I have no choice but to go and find the loo on the train. I follow the signs that lead me to a large panel of bright buttons. I press the blue one and a curved door opens silently. I lock the orange one that goes red and thank my stars I’m not colour blind. The train jumps around. Funny. It seemed smooth until now. I finish without a disaster and pray the electric buttons don’t fail on me. I don’t fancy the rest of this trip in this vinyl cell. I can think of prettier places.

I get to the airport after travelling the last stretch on an unmanned glass capsule. The tube-like train curves tightly above the city traffic on steel rails and I think of Star Trek. At security I set off the alarm and have to be searched, the woman said it was my sparkles… on my jumper… the silver thread. Had to laugh.

Then my case gets swivelled right on the conveyor and slides towards me behind glass to be searched.

Great.

I wait my turn. ‘Is this yours?’ Asks an enormous chap with a strawberry-blonde beard, holding my case as if it was packed with feathers.

‘Yes.’ I say, ‘I’m guessing the scanner doesn’t like my Christmas pudding?’

‘Yep that’s the one! And something else.’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘that’ll be the Bisto’. Feeling remarkably and surprisingly unashamed about travelling with an unopened (thank goodness) tub of Bisto gravy granules. And the guy quite rightly asks, ‘Don’t they have gravy in Spain?’

‘Yes’, I replied, feeling the pain, ‘but my Dad’s coming to stay. He doesn’t do olive oil’. I say with a smile, hoping to make a good impression. You never want to upset security in an airport, do you? ‘So it has to be the Bisto.’ That made him laugh. I will add here, in an attempt to redeem myself that this is the first time I have travelled with gravy powder across the border. Honest.

Having found the offensive articles he proceeds to check it for explosives of course. As you do. My mind takes a detour and envisages exploding gravy but all was fine.

A big smile. We’re done here.

I stumble across to a nearby chair in my socks, with my Christmas pudding, my gravy, ankle boots and a long, flowing, spotted scarf they’d asked me to remove, plus the suitcase and rucksack, wishing I had fifteen hands. I get myself back together in one piece, grateful I didn’t drop the gravy and it didn’t burst across the sparkly duty-free shop floor.

I strolled around the shops for something to do and come across a MacMillan fundraiser with curly, long hair. She singles me out as a fellow curly-haired-person. I look for cash to put in a tin, ‘No love. We do want your money’ she says with another smile, ‘but not today’, instead, she explains, they wanted donations, bank-standing-orders style and I said I don’t live here. She said there are tip tins somewhere around the airport instead and asked if I knew what MacMillan do and I say ‘Yes, yes I do.’ I smile. ‘You looked after my Mum two months ago’, and then of course the tears checked in. Oh god. Not again.

Everyone in this country seems to be unanimous about one thing; they don’t trust the trains so here I was, in the airport with hours to spare. There had been no delays. Everything was bang on time. The price to pay now, was the pipe-music. Christmas carols, just three of them played incessantly, stuck in a goddamn loop. The song sequence builds into a sickly-sweet crescendo with the obligatory sleigh bells.

I feel sorry for the employees. I’m tempted to ask them how they feel. I can’t help wondering how many people take sick-leave in the run up to Christmas due to Christmas carol repeat. Music injury. Even New Zealand authorities who were trying to disperse anti-mask protesters by playing Barry Manilow’s greatest hits played songs in a 15-minute loop!

Finally my gate is called. Looking forward to coming home but feeling terrible leaving Dad on his own. I felt kind of guilty that he gets used to my company and then has to readapt yet again to living alone and this week had been particularly tough.

We scattered Mum’s ashes. It was hard and weird and cold. I went with Dad into the funeral director’s office, unsure how he would cope. He’d told me the day before that he was dreading it. I bravely picked up Mum who was now in a smart cardboard box inside a paper bag and was surprisingly heavy.

The woman advises me to hold the bag from the bottom. I get in the car and plonk Mum between me and my sister and hear myself say rather stupidly, ‘there you go Mum, you don’t need a seatbelt this time.’

We are met at the cemetery by a young chap in his twenties who points to us where to go and asks us if we need any help.

Really?? I think…But you are so young! I can’t help thinking he has a story or two to tell working here.

Between the four of us, with all our 200-plus-years combined, we don’t know what we’re doing at all. Without any hesitation we are unanimously complicit in our lie and say we’ll be fine. Fake it till you scatter it. Or similar.

The three of us scatter the ashes in the pretty garden in totally different ways.

I start and try to aim for the roots of the border plants. My sister practically throws the stuff all over the lawn despite a fierce and freezing wind. I was thankful we weren’t downwind and Dad, a bit of a mixture of the two us. We then read out loud a little reading Dad had written and printed. I hear his voice rising higher and higher. His throat increasingly constricted with emotion.

Within seconds it gets us all and the tears flow into a river. In the corner of my eye, I catch the sight of my brother-in-law getting a tissue out of his pocket. Then there was silence, apart from the sound of our crying. We stood arm in arm in a huddled line, facing the apathetic, grey dust in a deafening swirl of silence, the wet tears stinging our faces in the wind. If there was something good in those tears we shared, I don’t know what it was. I felt as if we were tree-branch-thin, almost two-dimensional, like a paper pop-up and if an even stronger wind had suddenly picked up, we would have been knocked to the ground.

I had thought of finding a poem to read but Dad had said only yesterday, it needed to be personal. So before bed last night I’d written a few lines. They were from my heart and spontaneous, thinking mainly with Dad in mind, with the hope that my words would help him get back up off the floor after yet another tsunami of grief.

I don’t know if it made any sense but anyway I read it out loud, blinking back the tears with wet eyelashes. At some point in the middle I’m aware of my sister crying so gently and Dad taking a slow, deep sigh. I interpreted the sigh as being a good sign.

Dear Mum,

We chose this beautiful place with love and I know you would have approved. [ There’s a beautiful view from here.] I wanted to say, we’re doing the best we can in our own ways, learning to live without you.

You were strong and taught us to be the same. You admired strength of spirit, kindness and honesty and we do our best to honour your values. We’re thankful for what you taught us.

And it is all, alright.

We are all of the same cycle of life that keeps on turning; from the ocean to the stars, the rivers and flowers; we are all equal, all in transition, and at one with you.

With all our love Mum, rest well.

Then Dad accidentally flips an elastic band he must have had in his hand. It flies at great speed, landing precisely into the glass vase he brought with the candle he’d lit minutes before. He laughs saying he couldn’t have done that if he’d tried. And we laughed too. There was undoubtedly a sense of relief in our laughter. Mum would have liked that. The silliness. Life. The normal.

And then we left to cross the two kilometre bridge all huddled in one car for comfort. The tide was in and the views either side were immense. The reflected greys, silver and faint blues were uplifting and heartening. We went for lunch together. Hugged over hot mugs of coffee and then headed over the border into Wales for our walk with Alpacas in the bitter winter wind. A huge new farmhouse built with one side of glass, faced the valley and hills beyond. The distinctive Sugarloaf Mountain was illuminated by a warm, fading sun.

The walk with the Alpaca was weird. More for them than us I’m sure. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for mine, wondering who the hell I was. They are shy animals. Which makes the two of us, so there was a bit of a distance that the blustery wind tried its best to fill. Nevertheless, it’s silent feet walked up hill in time next to mine.

I couldn’t work out how the farm worked. They said 150 alpacas were arriving from New Zealand on Thursday by plane, but they already had 200 of them (and every one of them looks different). They told us they didn’t sell the meat or make a profit from the wool. Anyway, I wasn’t there to do the maths, we were there to distract Dad and he did smile from ear to ear as he stroked the neck of a huarizo. I’d never heard that word, also called a llapaca, which is basically a half-alpaca, half-llama who was called Kaleidoscope. They had the nuttiest of names.

I come nearly to the end of this essay as my flight is called and at last I can get away from the singing reindeer. I hear for the fiftieth time, ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like’…

oh get me out of here.

I head off towards the plane on a damp, metal-grey runway knowing soon I’ll be above the clouds and will see the sun from the plane window.

definitely the star of the day

A long essay this week but it’s been a while. I wrote the eulogy. It isn’t like I haven’t been writing but life has been busy that’s for sure, for all of us. I’m working on the second edition of my book and a new book too is taking shape. Went away for the weekend and am feeling a bit brighter now, though talking to Dad last night on the phone…well, it isn’t easy.

He was sitting in his arm chair. His woolly jumper didn’t quite cover his shirt collar and tie he’d worn to church that morning. It hadn’t been a brilliant morning. He’d arrived at his pretty church in the middle of nowhere only to find that someone had turned off the heating. The vicar then took the service while apologising for the fact that her microphone had fallen and slipped down somewhere, possible down her cleavage I wondered! Dad laughed briefly. Anyway, wherever it had nestled, Dad said he couldn’t hear a thing. He’s been very deaf for years now. Which only threatens to isolate him more. Two hearing aids help him but only up to a certain point. He’d got home to cook his Sunday lunch alone and accidently dropped the butter that landed upside down on the carpet, which was the tipping point. We chatted a while. He looked tired and then we said goodnight.

the smile we’d hoped to see

A lot of you have been through something similar and I thank you for all the kindness in writing and the sharing. It has really helped. The first few weeks, months, year, I know it is full of firsts.

In the next few weeks I think there will be less time for reading or writing. Maybe this might fill the gap. Here are two essays I read here on SubStack this week about animals and us and how our lives relate.

I loved reading Sandra Kay’s one-minute essay about a heron. Birds seem to speak to grief as flowers do to old age.

A Morning in the Life of a Heron

And here’s Susie’s week on a very chilly hill in southern France describing with love her rural life. I felt like I was right there in her kitchen willing the stove to light for her well-deserved coffee.

I want to be where snowflakes fall

Thank you for reading.

Lots of love.