—Annaliese Jakimides
A cluster flock of pigeons tips across the sky,
one breaking off to head somewhere
none of the others is going
Soundtrack of my days and nights: Jamiroquai…Snoop Dogg…Handel…Etta James…A Tribe Called Quest…Debussy…Gil Scott-Heron…Stanton Davis…Nina Simone. I select each one individually, put it in the player, one at a time. Not every one. Not every day.
These days the order is shifting, but there is always somewhere in the mix my son’s Jamiroquai, a group I never listened to until after he was gone. He’d given me three of their CDs at Christmas—his last Christmas. He gave them to me with no cases, no sleeves, no envelopes even. Just naked, exposed, vulnerable CDs balanced in the palm of his beautiful hand. Jamiroquai’s “Feel So Good” is the first thing I danced to after the night he left us. There was no dancing for months—months and months—but when I finally danced, I danced to “Feel So Good.”
It’s playing this morning and I’m dancing. Today is the day. It’s already November. I’ve been procrastinating for weeks, and now very little time remains before the ice begins to crust over the waters of the Penobscot River that runs through the middle of my little city. This Penobscot is calm and controlled, so unlike the one I left a couple years ago, the one whose confluences and tributaries and streams, the wildness, its dark brilliance, fed and circled and foundationed my son’s life, our lives, millennia of lives, up north on the edges of the North Maine Woods.
A ceaseless flowing, movement—like music—carrying us and our stories, our cultures, evolving.
This river on its journey used to carry logs from the north where my boy learned everything to my small city to ship nine million bf of lumber in fifty years, just twenty-nine more than my son has lived. I can’t imagine how these shores with the Sea Dog restaurant, a few benches, and a parking lot could have held 3,000 ships at anchor.
In different stages and times, conditions, we adapt to who we are to make the journey—be we river or human—and if we don’t, maybe can’t, there can be rupture, destruction.
Steady river for an unsteady son.
Here, now, some early mornings, sunlight shimmies through river crystals, a sure sign of impending winter. I’ve been on reconnaissance for days now, walking down by the riverbank, scouting out the best place. Requirements: light-filled, accessible, and definitely hidden from passers-by.
All of that seems an oxymoron of possibility, added to, of course, the need for this mother not to pitch and slip, slide down an embankment, scraped and damaged.
For over a year I kept my son in the living room in the blue cardboard box I picked him up in. Sealed. Never opened. I was unable to consider my child as bone fragments. Months ago, when I decided he couldn’t live with me forever, I moved him to the storage room in my apartment building. And there he’s waited.
I know there are people who would ask me, why now? But the truth is that no one has asked where he is, whether I’m holding on to him, whether I’ve already let him go. I can’t even yet explain to myself how I know the time is right. But I’ve known it for weeks now.
This morning breaks clean and brittle, a patina of sky through my bedroom window, crow flight in the foreground, crackles of newness as the city begins its citiness. Coffee, oatmeal. Check my e-mail. Dance around my apartment. It’s a normal beginning to an abnormal day. And now here I stand on the edge of my eight-by-ten storage room.
I have come for my son.
Yesterday I sorted through the green garbage bag of clothes the funeral home gave me months ago when I picked up the box of his ashes. I had held onto the socks, stiff and dirty like he always wore them, the sweatshirt his sister had given him that Christmas sliced down the back for its easy removal, the camouflage pants with his name printed on them, a small pack still carrying the paperwork for his instant tax return at H&R Block—the return that bought the gun. This morning only his pants are left—and the box—and him. Well, not exactly him. I know that. He can’t be in a cardboard box, and he can’t really be ashes.
The river isn’t far from my apartment. I walk, my boy in a Shaw’s supermarket bag. The handle breaks and he drops onto the sidewalk, still in his plastic bag that has popped out of the blue box I had slit open for ease of handling. I laugh as I pick him up, put him back in the box, put the box in the shopping bag.
One of the homeless walks by. We speak.
A brilliant, cold beginning, this day’s sun flashes in and out of the remaining leaves of the beech and maple; the scruffy alder branches brush my arms carrying the box, a box that is heavier than I had thought a five-inch cube of ashes could be. I balance us down the hardening bank, a new slipperiness underfoot, until I reach the place where I know I will be able to kneel, linger a bit, and let my child go. I hear the early morning traffic on Main Street, the idling engines at the Dunkin Donuts drive-through. I slip the top off, lift out the bag, untwist the tie, and dump the sepia-tinged ashes into this river that will carry them to the sea, and then around the world.
I sit on a large cold boulder and watch magenta light rupture the sky. Time unfolds and undoes space.
(Rivers of Ink: Literary Reflections on the Penobscot, anthology)
Photo by Annaliese Jakimides