An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir by Elizabeth McCracken Page A
Authors: Elizabeth McCracken
Tags: Literary, General, Family & Relationships, Medical, Personal Memoirs, Death; Grief; Bereavement, Biography & Autobiography, Self-Help, 20th Century, Biography, Gynecology & Obstetrics, Women, 21st Century, Novelists; American - 20th century, Novelists; American, Novelists; American - 21st century, McCracken; Elizabeth
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might have been horrified. Now we just slapped the dust off the seat of our pants and moved on.
Who would scatter ashes here? The lazy? The unambitious? You stumble from the crematorium, and say, Well, here’s as good a place as any? We were having Pudding cremated because we wanted to take him out of France, and it was easier to do so in an urn than in a coffin, and we didn’t know where we’d bury him. My father had suggested the graveyard outside the church at the bottom of Edward’s parents’ driveway, where we’d been married, but when I thought about it I didn’t want to feel sad every time we drove past. We’d scatter them somewhere beautiful, once we’d come up with the right place. Surely that was the point of cremation: you could take your beloved anywhere, let him rest anywhere, not just walk out the door and chuck. I didn’t understand.
Maybe you just couldn’t afford a burial: the embalming, the plot, the stone.
Maybe you just wanted to be done with the whole sad business, you’d attended to your dying relative for months or years, or you’d had a long life with him, too long, in fact. You wanted to fling your sorrow over your shoulder and never look back.
We didn’t want to get it over with; it would take months for us to scatter his ashes. For now we found some clean grass and sat and smoked and flicked those lighter ashes into the air. After half an hour, we walked back in. The funeral director demonstrated our new possessions: the ashes, which were inside an urn with another plaque underneath that said Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006, which slipped into an innocuous blue nylon bag, and a certificate explaining to suspicious customs agents what the substance was. We thanked him.
“I want to pry that plaque off with a knife,” said Edward as we left. “I don’t want the word Bordeaux anywhere near him.”
We got in a car and headed for the rocade, the highway that girdled the city, for the last time in our lives.
W hen I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card. You were supposed to give the man some money in exchange.
I have thought of that card ever since, during difficult times, mine or someone else’s: surely when tragedy has struck you dumb, you should be given a stack of cards that explain it for you. When Pudding died, I wanted my stack. I still want it. My first child was stillborn, it would say on the front. It remains the hardest thing for me to explain, even now, or maybe I mean especially now — now that his death feels like a non sequitur. My first child was stillborn . I want people to know but I don’t want to say it aloud. People don’t like to hear it but I think they might not mind reading it on a card.
I could have taken my cards, translated into French, to the stores of Duras, where the baker, the butcher, the dry cleaner, the grocery store ladies, had seen me growing bigger and bigger over the months: I couldn’t bear the idea of them seeing me deflated and asking after the baby. “Voilà,” I’d say, and hand over a card. I could have given a card to the imperious man at immigration in Portsmouth who almost denied me entry into England. To the waiter at the curry house that summer who was always mean to us. To the receptionist at the ob-gyn practice in Saratoga Springs at my first visit. To the nurses who asked me why I was scheduled for such close prenatal monitoring.
To every single person who noticed I was pregnant the second time, and said, “Congratulations! Is this your first?”
To every person who peeks into the stroller now and says the same thing.
Every day of my life, I think, I’ll meet someone and be struck dumb, and all I’ll have to do is reach in my pocket.
This book, I am just thinking now, is that card.
W hen I called my friend Ann the first time after Pudding died, she immediately asked what she could do,
Who would scatter ashes here? The lazy? The unambitious? You stumble from the crematorium, and say, Well, here’s as good a place as any? We were having Pudding cremated because we wanted to take him out of France, and it was easier to do so in an urn than in a coffin, and we didn’t know where we’d bury him. My father had suggested the graveyard outside the church at the bottom of Edward’s parents’ driveway, where we’d been married, but when I thought about it I didn’t want to feel sad every time we drove past. We’d scatter them somewhere beautiful, once we’d come up with the right place. Surely that was the point of cremation: you could take your beloved anywhere, let him rest anywhere, not just walk out the door and chuck. I didn’t understand.
Maybe you just couldn’t afford a burial: the embalming, the plot, the stone.
Maybe you just wanted to be done with the whole sad business, you’d attended to your dying relative for months or years, or you’d had a long life with him, too long, in fact. You wanted to fling your sorrow over your shoulder and never look back.
We didn’t want to get it over with; it would take months for us to scatter his ashes. For now we found some clean grass and sat and smoked and flicked those lighter ashes into the air. After half an hour, we walked back in. The funeral director demonstrated our new possessions: the ashes, which were inside an urn with another plaque underneath that said Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006, which slipped into an innocuous blue nylon bag, and a certificate explaining to suspicious customs agents what the substance was. We thanked him.
“I want to pry that plaque off with a knife,” said Edward as we left. “I don’t want the word Bordeaux anywhere near him.”
We got in a car and headed for the rocade, the highway that girdled the city, for the last time in our lives.
W hen I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card. You were supposed to give the man some money in exchange.
I have thought of that card ever since, during difficult times, mine or someone else’s: surely when tragedy has struck you dumb, you should be given a stack of cards that explain it for you. When Pudding died, I wanted my stack. I still want it. My first child was stillborn, it would say on the front. It remains the hardest thing for me to explain, even now, or maybe I mean especially now — now that his death feels like a non sequitur. My first child was stillborn . I want people to know but I don’t want to say it aloud. People don’t like to hear it but I think they might not mind reading it on a card.
I could have taken my cards, translated into French, to the stores of Duras, where the baker, the butcher, the dry cleaner, the grocery store ladies, had seen me growing bigger and bigger over the months: I couldn’t bear the idea of them seeing me deflated and asking after the baby. “Voilà,” I’d say, and hand over a card. I could have given a card to the imperious man at immigration in Portsmouth who almost denied me entry into England. To the waiter at the curry house that summer who was always mean to us. To the receptionist at the ob-gyn practice in Saratoga Springs at my first visit. To the nurses who asked me why I was scheduled for such close prenatal monitoring.
To every single person who noticed I was pregnant the second time, and said, “Congratulations! Is this your first?”
To every person who peeks into the stroller now and says the same thing.
Every day of my life, I think, I’ll meet someone and be struck dumb, and all I’ll have to do is reach in my pocket.
This book, I am just thinking now, is that card.
W hen I called my friend Ann the first time after Pudding died, she immediately asked what she could do,
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