Gratisued
“The first holiday is the toughest,” my therapist told me on Tuesday morning before extending an offer to contact her on Thanksgiving if the need arose.
Sue gave me twelve days to prepare for my favorite holiday alone. I never expected her to cease being stubborn in death, but she could’ve ramped down her insistence on going full tilt in everything she did.
During the lull in regularly scheduled activities of Covid Spring 2020, Sue and I had discussed how (mostly) happy we were with our lives. She was about to turn fifty and said that if she “got hit by a bus,” her phrase whenever conversing about death, she had lived her time to the fullest. In a typically unselfish refusal to indulge the financial and geographical inconvenience that spreading her ashes near Disney World (or Land) would incur, she told me that when the distant time came to scatter them, to do so at Misquamicut Beach.
I’d opted to store her ashes, handed to me in a nondescript black plastic container with a gold seal affixed to the lid, inside an oversized SpongeBob SquarePants tin that once housed popcorn. Extracting several spoonfuls, the ashes looked like kitty litter accompanied by pieces of chipped teeth as I dumped them inside the sandwich bag chosen to be the less cumbersome travel vessel. Sue’s desert island disc (Harry Styles’s Fine Line) and favorite band (Twenty One Pilots) played as I drove the same route we had in May, coining that ride as our annual trip to the beach, although she’d told me three weeks prior that it would likely be her last summer.
During that visit, we sat in two Adirondack chairs by a local surf bar, Sue taking pictures of our shoes, of famished seagulls, and of the view, a collection of rock slabs, maybe a dozen feet of shoreline, and the unending Atlantic beyond. Just as I sat in one of those same chairs and began writing in my notebook, I heard a woman with an accent talking to her dog and immediately summoned my Inner Sue to choose happiness, not hate.
My best friend, Moore, had emailed in the morning before I departed: “Be sure to make a random stranger’s day. Or, if someone sees you and asks whose ashes you’re scattering, reply, ‘Not who — what. Those were mail-in ballots from pro-Trump districts in 2020. The fix is real and I’m part of it!’”
As I looked over, the middle-aged woman pulled up her sweatpants, but not before I saw a generous percentage of her ass crack, the way all funereal days should begin. Leash gripped tightly, she kept muttering to her black dog until I said I’d be happy to pet the mutt, something I could’ve never done with Sue on hand, her an anxious mess around any dog. My right hand and Bella’s coarse fur got acquainted as the chatty woman surprisingly thanked me for petting her (“She’s a nervous nelly”), asked what I was writing, disclosed how getting a cold led to her skipping a visit to a friend’s house for turkey dinner, and inquired about what brought me to Westerly.
Unwilling to unleash the heaviness of the day on the lady, named Rosemarie, I said how my father’s family no longer had the childhood Thanksgiving I spent all year anticipating, so I’d ventured to the beach alone instead. I recommended she stay hydrated, eat some fruits and vegetables, get enough sleep, and try Alka-Seltzer Cold, writing it on a piece of paper so she’d remember to buy it on her ride home. She said she thought some sun would help too, and after getting her permission to photograph Bella, I meandered in search of shells, a task Sue declared essential during each visit.
When I found the right one, the welcome slight crack in it a metaphorical scar for the day itself, I removed a velvety green zip-up pouch with a beaded monkey’s face sewn into it from my sweatshirt pocket. Sue had purchased the keepsake at Follow Your Heart, a beloved all-vegan grocery store-slash-café near Los Angeles, and when I found it after she died, I filled it with the talismans she once carried prior to adding a few from her final days (her Taylor Swift concert movie ticket stub, a print-out of her heartbeat from the hospital monitor, and a note her friend Amy had left by her bedside). The shell would be the twenty-fifth piece of her essence I now felt obligated to carry with me until I, too, got hit by a bus.
The profundity of things I witnessed in the chair was mine alone: a loner picking up trash from the sand, a seagull cascading down to the breakers like the one on Chick Corea’s Return to Forever album cover, even an overturned lifeguard chair, all equally meaningful and meaningless in her absence. With nobody in sight, I selected the right juncture to dump a plastic tablespoon of ashes on the beach then another in the water, as if being caught would alert the grief police.
With her closest friends, Nichole and Amy, I watched Sue on her final day in the hospital, mentioning the “movie” that plays in the farewell minute or two of one’s life, a “greatest hits” montage to conclude transcending our consciousness. In fifty-three-plus years jam-packed with adventure, what four seconds from Misquamicut did Sue see? I’d finally met her childhood best friend, Naomi, a week after Sue died, and asked her to tell me the best Sue story she could recall.
“How about the time she lied to her parents and said she was staying at my house all weekend, but really went to Misquamicut to lose her virginity?” Naomi rhetorically replied. “Do you know how hard it was to keep up with bus schedules? I actually had to work at the produce stand the day she left. And guess who rides up on his fuckin’ bicycle? Her dad!”
At the base of the cottage where Sue and her family stayed during summer vacations, I took a few photos then stood at the water’s edge only to notice a blue-and-yellow figurine in the saltwater beside the rocks. It was a glittery Snow White, the Disney princess fondest of animals, an invigorating sign from Sue that my antennae had been calibrated to register.
My emotions finally turned pugilistic, jabbing and uppercutting my tear ducts, as I sat on a swing by the main beach entrance. I admired the distant onion bulb-shaped water tower peaking above tree cover and overheard a kid tell his sister, “You made it out alive!” after she exited the porta potty, a joke he had no clue could devastate an eavesdropping stranger. The golden hour, a gorgeous moniker for nature’s countdown to the nightly void, arrived as I saw a thin woman in shoes but no socks, a car parked askew, and admired the symmetry of the fences beside the road, observances Sue and I would’ve normally spent far too many minutes dissecting, me often worried by what she didn’t say when my neurotic attention to details went on its weekly bender. Instead, I checked my text messages and wondered if Sue would do the same if roles were reversed, forever regarding her mythically, as if her comportment wouldn’t allow for such pedestrian behavior amid the mourning.
Back at the chair where my beach day began, I studied the peach-colored horizon line and waved to a new lady restraining her brown-spotted white dog from racing into a watery grave. Stippled sunlight danced on the waves like it did when reflecting off the tinsel in Sue’s hair. I attempted to summarize our shared sixteen years of memories, the way she had presumably done in the last forty or so seconds of her linear deathbed movie, and battled my desire to fret about the however many moments I’m forced to live without her.
The final bits of ashes absconded from the sandwich bag as I raced from the shore, comically fearful of soaking my feet prior to the drive home as the ghost of Sue certainly cry-laughed nearby. I got in the car and bawled. My mind had become the weather, dark with a barely visible glimmer of hovering afterglow. Christmas was a month away, but I sensed the gift of her infinite generosity, grateful she left me her umbrella.