Goodbye

I sat curled up on a rock a little way out into the water. The rest of my family stood on the shore in small groups, fragmented like always as my mother scattered my grandfather’s ashes into the waves.

He had always loved the sea and told endless stories about his time in the navy while we played cards. He told stories about Guglielmo the Sicilian gun runner and his pet monkey sneaking around the rocky shores, surfing in Palestine on surfboards that looked more like ironing boards, and lazy shore leave on the beaches by Marseille.

My grandfather told be so many stories, before he forgot.

Before he forgot me.

Before he forgot my mother.

Before he forgot his wife, his home.

Before he forgot himself.

We watched as he disappeared. Everything was gone, everything except his memories of the sea. He told those stories over and over again, living in the memories, until he was gone. He had stayed in memories of the sea for so long, we decided that was where he would want to stay.

The sky was dark as we made our way to the beach to say goodbye and a cold wind blew from the south. The kind of wind that freezes you from the inside out. So, in the gloom and the wind I sat on my rock alone. I watched as my mother waded out into the small waves with the urn, my grandmother at the water’s edge, drained of all emotion. My uncle and his family stood even further back being as separated as they could while still being involved, weighed down with sadness and the resentment that my mother had been chosen to scatter the ashes and not him. Looking back at the six black pillars standing frozen on the beach, all I wished was to have loving arms to hold me, and I deeply regretted that none except my mother’s could be found on the shore. So fractured, and now with one less reason to call ourselves a family.

The wind fell just as my mother tipped the urn, the dark calm before a storm. The ashes rained down into the water mixing slowly with the light foam as they drifted out past the rocks.

We were all still as my grandmother held my sobbing mother.

My stone-faced uncle was the first to turn and leave as I heard as splash at the bottom of my rock. An old brown seal flopped onto the rock by me feet and looked up at me with its huge black eyes. I couldn’t tell you how long the seal stayed there for, but it just lay there looking straight into my eyes, its own kind, black eyes deep with warmth.

Finally, the seal rolled back into the water and swam away, dancing through the ashes, and out to sea.

I don’t care what anyone says, I will always believe that seal was my grandfather coming to say the goodbye he never got, before disappearing into the sea.