1 more year

Last year, my brother and I packed up the red hat box containing my mother's ashes and took my grandmother's glorified sardine can on wheels up to Sylt, the northernmost German island in the North Sea. This is the island my family had vacationed on since my mother was a little kid, and she had wanted to have her ashes to be scattered in the sea there.

The problem was, it's against German law to scatter someone's ashes. As a matter of fact, it's against German law to keep someone's ashes in a private home. Don't ask me why they have decided to expend legal energy on such a frivolous matter. It did force us to be somewhat clandestine about our operation, which I would have secretly enjoyed (rebel that I am) if it hadn't been my mother's ashes.

It took us 5 hours or so to drive up to the train station where the car train leaves for the island (there's no bridge), though I'm afraid we stopped to pee more than the one time my mother usually alloted to this necessity. We were lucky to snag a spot on the upper level of the car train, which gives you a great view as you approach the island.

I hadn't been to the island for years, and of course things had changed a lot, but the essential stuff (the smell, the feeling of the salty air, etc) hadn't. We spent the night in a hotel, my brother watching a soccer world cup game, and I wandering the village streets and realizing yet again that everything does get smaller as you get older.

The next morning, July 2, we set out pretty early for the beach as to avoid curious onlookers. The supervised part of the beach we used to go to didn't extend as far north as it used to, which made it easier to find a less populated spot. I dumped the ashes from their triple-layer freezer bags into the hat box and put in some wild rose blooms and a bag of my mother's favorite candy for good measure.

My über-tall brother carried the box into the water with me following him (my first time ever actually submerging myself in that water in my entire life -separate story) and once he could barely reach the bottom, he took the lid off the box and pushed it away from us into the water until it sank. The tide was going out, so hopefully it was taking the box with it, but the ashes dissolved immediately. The rose blooms floated on the water for a while.