My Sister's Bones

 (In loving memory of my sister, who passed away between Christmas and New Year's)

~*~

My sister’s bones are ashes now. 

They will be mixed with cement and sunk into the ocean, to become part of a coral reef. She wanted to give something back to the beach she loved as a small girl, when she wandered for hours, sea lapping at her toes, collecting shells.

I’ve been taught her soul is sleeping, waiting for a future day to come alive again in paradise on earth. They say she’ll be resurrected into a new body; free of the cancer that took her away from me and the world.

I cannot imagine her this way.

I feel her soul very much awake. In me, in things and photographs and music I’m humming along with. The songs she taught me to sing. The melodies she loved.

I cannot imagine her in an urn. The thought of the process of her becoming such shallow remains is just too shocking. It leaves me desolate.

Thinking of her as part of the living coral reef, though, involves me first accepting those ashes I cannot fathom being mixed with that cement and molded into a ball larger than she was tall.

I can’t bear thinking of the process from her death to her rebirth as part of a living aquatic ecosystem. To think of her cremains sitting on a shelf feels disrespectful. Yet I know they only do the memorial reef ceremonies a few times a year. So her bones turned to ash will wait to be remade as she wished them to be.

I will wait to find acceptance of her passing deep in my own bones, even as she whispers in my ear moment to moment “I’m still here, alive, in you. Sing to my music, laugh at my wit, marvel at my bravery.”

Someday I’ll go to the beach in Fort Lauderdale, perhaps, and walk along the shore.

I’ll gaze out at the ocean and feel the tide lap at my toes.

I’ll collect seashells, and know my sister is part of all I see around me.

I’ll hold her close in my heart, hear her voice in the cry of gulls.

No one can make me believe she’s sleeping.

-February Grace