I watch a lot of Asian TV shows - I'm a huge K-drama rom com fan and indulge myself in long, luxurious binges. Right now I am watching The Journalist with the wonderful "Doctor X" Ryoko Yonekura. As in so many Asian dramas, often time scenes are set in graveyards or mausoleums. The characters often talk directly to the deceased as if they were alive.
It hit me that there is nowhere on earth where I can find my immediate ancestors. In Honolulu, under gnarled trees and neighboring Kawaiahao Church built by my great-great-great grandfather and the Hawaiian Christian Community of the 19th century, there is a graveyard of missionary descendants which includes some of the earlier generations of my family, the Binghams. It costs these days too much perhaps for me to buried there, It's a cool, peaceful place and many of the markers are fading with time. I liked it there.
But I would like somewhere, somewhen, someone to mark that I once lived. Do we all just come and go?
I wish that there were a grave marker for my Daddy - Herr Doktor Professor V(W)alter A Fairservis Y(J) unior as I once saw on an envelope sent to him from Germany. "Our Father who art upstairs" as I often thought of him while he was writing something, perhaps his next book, way up in the attic.
I wish that I could stand in front of a grave marker for Grandmother Nana Edith Yeager, the unknown Grandfather Walter Fairservis the 1st. Some place to think about and remember Aunt Louise Yeager. I think my father told me that when our Nana was being carried down the stairs to go to the hospital, I was the last one to speak to her. When her ashes came, my father said, he went up the mountain behind our house at 234 Mountain Road and let the wind take them off around the world.
I wish that there was some place that memorialized Papa, my grandfather, Charles Moseley Sutherland. Maybe it is the statue of Duke Kawanamoku, the famous surfer, that Papa swam with when he was a young and beautiful man spending his teens with family in Hawaii when his father died.
I am glad when I think of it that there is a place for Mema, Beth Benton Sutherland. She has a rock.
When I was 17 or 18, I think, just graduated from high school with an open summer, I had a very strong internal message that it was important that I go up to Nantucket island. My sister Elf and I made our way there; stopping off first on Martha's Vineyard to visit a friend, Charlie Cooley. It was the summer that "Jaws" came out and I remember standing by the sea, terrified. For years, I was afraid of sharks.
We went on - the 3 of us - to Nantucket. Our grandparents had purchased an island vacation cottage back in the early 50's - Toad Hall, they called it. Papa who was so skilled in carpentry and art built an artful studio with a skylight above their bed. Set in a hollow below sea level, the winds passed above the cottage snapping the American flag that each morning Papa would hoist up and each evening, we would solemnly pull down and fold into a tricorn.
Charlie's family had a car on the island. It was big and plush with automatic seat adjustments and deep cushiony seats. As I remember it was maroon. On a typical gray Nantucket summer day with a light mist in the air, he came to pick us up for a ride - Mema and Papa, Elf and I, and Charlie driving.
We drove up to 'Sconset. If I were Scots, I would probably call it "a wee hamlet." Lovely cottages there, covered in flowers. Behind the general store, there is a little path down to the beach. We parked and walked down to listen to the waves crashing.
And Mema said, "When I die, I want to die on Nantucket in the fall."
I don't know why that still echoes in my head half a century later but there it is.
And so Elf and I went home to Connecticut after about 2 weeks visiting the grandparents on Nantucket. And sure enough, the call came that Mema had had a heart attack under the skylights there in the Studio. In the fall, on Nantucket, like she wanted.
Each summer, she would wield heavy tools and cut paths through the brambles that surrounded the hollow. There is a large rock somewhere in that jungle and she would clear around it. I was told by someone that her ashes were scattered there.
There is a tree planted on the land of what was our home for 30 plus years. My sisters and mother thought that our father was like an oak - I think it is an oak. With friends gathered for a memorial about a month after he died - July 12, 1994 - we scattered ashes around that tree.
And later, my youngest sister snuck ashes in her suitcase into Egypt. Mama and I went to the Fort at Hierakonpolis, probably the oldest brick structure in the world, perhaps it was a corral for cattle - who knows? And there where archaeologists dug up the bones of early Egyptians, we laid my father to rest, scattering handfuls of ashes in the Egyptian desert wind.
I believe in the power and rightness of cremation. When my mother was thinking about how to dress my father's body, I knew he would be best in the white galabea gown that he wore to give his last lecture. The topic: Zoroastrianism. Perhaps that religion best envisions the never-ending battle between good and evil and a benevolent power in the universe that embraces even the lost souls. Perhaps the precepts of that religion best embody all the good things about the flawed and difficult genius that was our father.
Fire burns away all impurities and what remains - the ashes - scatter in the winds. But still I wish there were some marker, some gravestone, for the people I have loved, some place where I could go in my mind to speak with them.
I built a little altar with a few special things I have with me, carried in the depths of a suitcase in my peripatetic life. I look at it and think, "Yes, there are people that I have loved in my life. And yes, they loved me, too."
Also sprach Zarathustra.
Copyright 2023, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)
