Buried at Sea

If you look for death it's always there, aliveness casting a shadow with the inevitability of the tides.

Clumps of grass stick to my feet, dew-kissed beneath scattered stars as I begin my funeral march. Over the lawn, across the road, down the beach and towards the silver sea, cradling the casket in the moonlight. Inside are fifty bone-white tuatua shells, each the shape of a tiny gravestone, a half-carapace that cupped a little life before I picked them out of the sand and steamed them.

I wade into the water, seafoam tickling my legs as I tip the tuatua shells out of the plastic tub and into the roiling surf. Fifty dancing ghosts clatter and splash and swoop out of sight and I splosh shorewards, marvelling at the human capacity for tucking death neatly away, folding it out of sight like gristle on a tray of chuck steak. If you look for it, it's always there, aliveness casting a shadow of deadness with the inevitability of the tides.

I’m scared of death. I tell myself the most outrageous lies about that, but it’s true. I’ll deny it tomorrow, just you wait. Look at me, writing about death. Unconquerable, ungovernable. I’ll ride a motorcycle, I’ll climb a mountain, I’ll walk into the ocean at midnight. Fight me.

The most convincing lie I tell, the one with a pitted and paradoxical core of truth, is that I’m too familiar with death to be afraid. I know that after an autopsy, they put your guts back in your stomach cavity in bags, and sew your lips closed. I know that someone held my brother’s cold heart in their hands and weighed it. I wonder how you measure the heaviness of the space left behind.

Dark matter.

Invisible, intangible, shapeless, aching, wailing.

I know that an empty ribcage can hold the weight of Creation itself.

You’re never the same again, once death has taken one of your dearest. Touch the hands of the still, blank thing that once housed them, and you are lost. You’ve felt the thing nobody really survives feeling, though they won’t bury or burn you until your own eyes close and you fall silent forever.

Memento mori. Remember that you will die.

They’re good words to live by, but I tend to think living well is only possible if you also forget, and keep remembering and forgetting over and over, holding each one lightly and switching hands often. If I could truly hold memento mori in mind, I suspect I’d wind up mindless and mad, transfixed by the primal fear that still wakes me in the night sometimes. The terror that leaves me gasping, grabbing for the closest warm body, a life raft in the endless sea that will drown me in the end.

When you’ve seen death up close, the end of all things becomes real in a way you can never un-know. As this, so that. One day, it will be my body lying cold and still, unseeing, unknowing. Whatever it is that types these words will be gone beyond the reach of light or sound or touch or thought.

They’ll carry my body out of the same chapel I sat in so many times while I was alive, hating every second of what passes for funeral rites.

---

My mind takes me back there in an instant, to that stuffy chapel. There’s an ugly fake waterfall behind the coffin, and it’s more real to me in that moment than the waves surging around my calves. I can see spotless glass gleaming in the harshness of the afternoon sun. I can feel the familiar weight of a generic funeral booklet in my lap, and I can feel the same irritation and agony simmering in the back of my throat as I listen to a celebrant’s generic eulogy. Different faces, different names, but the same fake camaraderie, the same sombre cadence interspersed with lightness and toothy smiles and carefully timed pauses. One of them gave me her business card once, telling me “I also do weddings”.

It’ll be funny one day, but not yet.

If I speak at a funeral, I feel horrible afterwards. Like I’ve done some kind of cheaply narcissistic trick, parading my words before the wet-eyed crowd, somersaulting with my hands in fresh grave dirt.

If I don’t speak, I feel differently horrible. Like I’ve withheld a last gift, shirked the impossible task of trying to capture the life of someone I loved in linguistics.

Even when it’s over, it isn’t over. After the service, the same repulsive tea, weaker than a day-old kitten, marinating in the same silver urns. The same blocky white mugs, scarred grey if you care to look closely enough, marked by the stirring and stacking of a thousand thousand days like this. Pre-frozen sausage rolls barely licked by warmth, and soggy asparagus sandwiches. I want to scream. I want to light a cigarette in the middle of the room, I want to slam doors and cry so hard my shoulders shake, I want to be anywhere but here. I want to say, they were more than this. So much more than this. That we are all mad.

I say what is permissible.

“Yes, it was a nice service, wasn’t it?”

---

A rogue wave slaps me, tousling my hair with spray, and I am back in the present, back in the sea in the dark. Holding the now-empty plastic container, feeling live tuatua and empty shells beneath my toes as I dig absent-minded circles in the sand.

I hope, when it’s my time, that somebody returns my bones to the sea. An alive place, and a place where death mingles throughout the aliveness, each inseparable from the other. I watch a crab pick yellow threads of roe out of a cracked sea egg. I smell fresh rock kelp shot through with the tang of weeks-dead seaweed.

Bury me in the soup of life and find me in the beak of a gull, or under a scallop shell, or rolling in the tuatua beds. Tip me out, tell your favourite story of us together. Remember that one day, you will follow me into the dark.

Memento mori.