Nora last saw my mother two days before she died. It was an unusual interaction, because my mother asked for a hug. She and Nora never hugged, but as Nora was leaving that evening, my mom requested one. “I hugged her. I walked out, came back in, and gave her another one. It was so strange,” she murmured. “I wonder if people know when they’re passing?
“When I went in that Friday, I didn’t go to her bedroom right away. I heard the TV going upstairs. I said, ‘She’s watching her television.’ I went in the kitchen because she loved to eat. I made Thai food for her. I was probably there ten minutes. I go up to her bedroom, and I was like, ‘Oh God, no.’ She was blue in the face. She looked very peaceful, though. It looked like she was sitting on the bed then decided to lay down. I think your mom, she’s at peace now,” Nora said, crying quietly. “It was lonely for her in that big house.”
“Yes,” I said, wiping a tear from my face. “It was.”
Four years after her death in 2010, my mother’s ashes were still in a cardboard box in my sister’s attic. Alexandra and I had debated getting a plot for her ashes in a Boston cemetery or entombing them underwater in a coral reef built to evoke the lost city of Atlantis, but nothing felt right, so nothing was done. I was grateful for our indecision when I learned from my mother’s diary that our parents had spread Yuri’s ashes on Cader Idris in Wales. From the moment he’d died, my mother longed to be with him again. I could reunite them. When I asked my sister if I could spread our mother’s ashes in the same location, she agreed. “I can leave you some,” I told her. “If you want to spread some somewhere else, or do it together, I understand.”
“Take them all,” she told me. “What else are we going to do with them?”
The night before I flew to Wales, I gathered the documents I needed from file cabinets in my sister’s attic: my mother’s death certificate and a card from the funeral parlor I hoped would act as a “proof of cremation.” I brought them and the small, heavy box that held my mother into my sister’s guest room. Worrying that Alex might change her mind and want to spread some on her own or use them in a memorial at some point in the future, I decided to take only half. Sitting on the floor with a ziplock bag, I opened the box and saw the ashes for the first time. They looked like dirty flour.
I shook some of them into the bag. These were the ashes I’d leave behind. My mother tumbled out in streams and spurts, a spectrum of grays and whites that were occasionally lighter than bone. It wasn’t just dust; chunks that looked like knuckles fell by themselves. I kept telling myself that this was my mother, but it seemed too strange to be true.
After ten hours of travel with my mother, who looked like a lovingly packed bag of blow, I landed in Cardiff, picked up a rental car, and drove across Wales. Cader Idris was at the southern end of Snowdonia National Park, a huge swatch of land that touched the very top of the country and, for a long section, ran rough along the Irish Sea. On two-lane roads narrower than most bike paths, I drove past glittering lakes and a patchwork of green forest and farms. The landscape looked as though a special-effects artist created it; it was more perfect than nature, more real than real life.
I’d booked a room at the inn closest to the base of the mountain. When I checked in, the owner, a tall, affable man, informed me that the building was older than America. It was quaint and cramped; brown wooden beams lined the low ceilings. He handed me a key and a warm pint of lager, and pointed me toward the steep staircase that led to my room.
Before dinner, I walked down a path covered in slugs swollen like blisters. Woods expanded into fields full of sheep that bleated in pitches high and low—short like hiccups, long like pleas. I walked to the gates of the park, which were simple and easily unlatched. A board displayed maps and warnings in English and Welsh—a language I was trying and failing not to find ridiculous for its storybook appearance and sounds. One laminated flyer asked, “Will you go home tonight?” “A ewch chi adref heno?” Another detailed weather hazards and dangers hikers might encounter. “Do you have the ability to cope?” it inquired. “If in doubt—TURN BACK.” I thought, “I’ll find out tomorrow.”
Later, I lay on my narrow bed with another lager and wondered why my parents had chosen to spread Yuri’s ashes here. Wales was as green and pastoral as promised, and I understood wanting Yuri to be in a place of great beauty. But England was full of beautiful places, many much closer to London. The history of Cader Idris didn’t offer an explanation. Cader meant “chair” in Welsh. Idris was a mythical giant who studied the stars as he sat on the mountain like it was his throne; he enjoyed astronomy, poetry, and philosophy. It was said that anyone who slept next to one of the area’s three lakes would wake up to find they’d gone mad or become a poet. Both were options parents usually didn’t wish for their child.
My breakfast was waiting for me in the dining room the next morning—oily eggs and mushrooms—and my lunch was in a bag behind my white coffee cup. As I was leaving, the owner said I should change into hiking clothes. I told him I was wearing them. In tight jeans and battered orange sneakers, with a leather purse instead of a backpack, I looked ready for a trip to a farmers’ market, not a six-mile trek.
When a small sign asked me to pick a trail, I chose the one to my left because it went up the mountain. The other went into a dark forest.
Sheep were everywhere again, scampering over moss and slippery rocks into bushes from which they stuck out their heads to berate me. The hills and peaks that rose around me had large, rocky outcrops and bursts of white and yellow flowers. As I climbed, the grass became a shade lighter and took on the gleam of the towering, silver boulders shaped and smoothed by glaciers that had retreated thousands of years ago.
I came to Tal-y-llyn Lake within an hour, a wide pool that reflected the grays of the rock wall that seemed to prop it up. The lake was as accurate as a mirror until I stood at its edge and the rocks that lay below the surface appeared and mixed with the clouds above.
I placed my hands in the water, which was frigid though it was June. I watched them age and regress as the sun played off them. “Was it here?” I wondered. My parents would have stopped there, too. I didn’t know what else I’d see on the hike, but the lake seemed a likely location. Then I remembered that they’d made the trip in early spring. It would have been cold, even snowy, and the lake possibly frozen. I put my hand in my purse, touched my mother’s ashes, and thought, “Too soon.”
Back on the path, I saw my young parents in front of me, my father taking my mother’s hand when the trail was steep or slippery. I saw them separate as my father rushed toward a finish and she lingered behind to stall her arrival.
The path swung to the side of the mountain and became steeper. In some places, rocks grew from the earth in natural steps; in others, they were obstacles. No place seemed right until I came to a grassy spot high above the lake. Ahead of me was a steep drop, but behind me were fields, more rocks, and, eventually, the ocean.
I sat with my bag in my lap, I tugged on some wildflowers, and then clung to a coarse cut of grass until my hand became a fist. I was a third of the way through the hike. I was starting to suspect I wouldn’t find one right place to spread my mother’s ashes, or one that would make itself known as where they’d scattered Yuri’s. I thought of my parents again. The surroundings were gorgeous but also foreboding, and the hike wasn’t easy. I stopped to catch my breath many times and twisted my ankle twice while sliding off a rock. They may have felt their journey was a punishment, too difficult to bear physically or emotionally in their raw state and not have even done the full loop.
I tried to see it differently. The loose, overgrown ferns were my mother’s optimism, her joy and humor. The silver rocks were scars; the loose pebbles and dry grass, the difficult path she’d had. The wildflowers were what she could have been.
“Yuri,” I said out loud, “I’m so sorry you died. Your death extinguished a part of our par
ents that they dragged with them to their own deaths. What happened to you wasn’t fair. I don’t know why my parents brought you here, but they did, so that’s why I brought Mom here, too.”
I took a breath and kept going. “Mom, I hope it’s okay you’re here. I know it took me a really long time to bring you somewhere, but I’m glad I waited. This makes sense. I’m so sorry for everything that happened to you, and for the things you did to yourself because you were in so much pain. I’m sorry I didn’t really know you or understand you. I love you. I love you too, Yuri.”
I stood up, opened the bag of ashes, and ran my fingers through them, feeling their softness and coarseness. I turned around in circles, trying to figure out the wind by how it hit my face. I scooped up a small amount of ashes and, without looking, released them. Some of them dropped straight to the ground, while some went a few inches or even a foot away. The lightest bit landed on my shirt. I was looser with my next batch. I let some fall, then tossed the rest to the lake below, and watched them expand until they disappeared.
The air cooled as I gained elevation. Although I hadn’t gotten rid of much of my mother, I felt lighter. I looked for other “right” places, and found that everywhere looked right. Every place I saw was pretty enough, grand enough.
I took out clumps of my mother and let her fly from my fingers as I walked. I thought of her dancing as a child, and everything that dancing child wanted. By spreading her ashes, I was throwing flowers at her feet.
When I reached what seemed like the top of the mountain, I spread the ashes more purposefully. I didn’t speak to her or Yuri again out loud, just in my head, like they were children I was tucking in together. “There you go,” I said.
Again, feeling lighter than I had before, I flung ashes as I broke into a jog. She flew into in my hair and onto my tongue, and when I licked my lips, I found her there, too. “Sorry,” I said aloud. “I think I was trying to channel Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, your favorite movie after Lawrence of Arabia and Out of Africa. I know I never wanted you to visit me in New York, but if I’d let you, as a surprise I would have taken you to The Sound of Music sing-along in Chelsea. You would have adored that.”
I leaned against an improbably large rock and let it cool my face. I was on a flat part of the trail, the other side of the mountain sloping into cultivated fields, then a town, then the light blue rub of the ocean until it blended with the sky. I reached into my bag and placed some of my mother there, sprinkling bits directly onto the ground. When a family walked by, I made sure the bag was concealed. I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing. I patted the ashes down and whispered, “I hope you’re happy.”
Two hours later, I reached the end of the trail, where it linked up with the start. I was hot, sticky with sweat, but when a breeze ran up my arms, I shivered. I took out the bag and saw that much more was left than I’d assumed. The sun was low and my legs were tired, but I had to finish. I started on the path again and immediately ran into a family with three complaining kids. “We’re almost done,” the mom said wearily.
“Just starting out?” the dad asked, concerned.
I told him no, I just needed to take a picture.
I went all the way back to the lake, the first place I’d stopped. The mountain was empty, even the sheep had gone home. I said goodbye to the rest of my mother and shook out the bag until it was empty.
My mother was all over me. She was stuck to my cheeks and neck, under my nails, and on my teeth. If I went back to the inn like that, some of her would end up going down the shower drain.
The sky was turning dusky. I peeled off my clothes and tossed them behind me. When I’d put my hands in earlier, the water felt chilly, but on my feet, it was a frigid cold I’d never experienced, metallic and spiky, so sharp it could slice my bones. Goose bumps exploded across my body as I pushed farther in. The water was so clear that I was able to see my feet and shins go from pink to red to a deeper red that felt much worse. I crouched and brought water over my arms, trying to remove as much of the ashes as I could. Then I got lower and let my hair fan out in the water, scratching my head. “You’re free” is what I told her, told the mountain. Although parts of her were still in Boston, I believed that she was. I wasn’t yet free of my anger and regret, but I was getting there.
At the inn, the owner greeted me and said he’d been worried; I’d been gone much longer than I should have. He took in my muddy sneakers and wild hair. “Bitter or lager?” he asked.
I returned to Ukraine in the fall of 2014, a few months after the twentieth anniversary of my father’s death. I wanted to see his world, to understand why it and his work had been so important to him, and to learn more about the car crash that had killed him.
There were two competing theories about his death: Either it was a premeditated hit or it was an accident. The majority of Ukrainians or Ukrainian Americans I spoke to heard “murder” when I said “car crash,” whether they’d known my father or not. Some people offered vague evidence to support their belief: My father once worked for the government; as a venture capitalist, he could have angered the competitors of one of the business he’d funded; Ukraine was a country where life had little value, and where a hundred dollars—the price of having someone killed in the nineties—was a fortune.
Others said my father wasn’t important enough to kill. He wasn’t supposed to be traveling that night, no one knew where he was, and coordinating something so complicated would have been close to impossible. When I used the explanations of the second group to counter the arguments of the first, I was interrupted. All of that was irrelevant. They knew it was murder because they knew Ukraine. That’s how business was done back then. And, they added, how it was still done today.
Physically, much of Kiev was the same as when I’d first visited as a teenager. Pretty cobblestone streets led to staid squares and wide boulevards lined with government buildings, but modern apartment buildings now towered over them. Kiev had seemed empty when I’d visited at fourteen, with no one on the street and only a few stores with nothing in them. But now the streets were packed with shuffling babushkas and rowdy teenagers crooning into their phones, and there were tons of opportunities to spend money if you had it. You could buy traditional Ukrainian food in cafeterias for a dollar or two, or spend hundreds on a five-course French meal. You could purchase tight dresses for clubbing from the stalls that lined the subterranean walkways of metro stations or in the Givenchy section at the Sanahunt department store. You could continue to repair your old Lada or swap it for an Aston Martin.
It was a warm fall. The autumn light was the kind that could make anything beautiful, even a rusted streetcar, but people wore winter faces. The previous year, President Viktor Yanukovych had failed to sign an agreement with the European Union that many hoped would lead to political and economic reforms and freedoms. There was huge public support for the measure, and when Yanukovych didn’t enact it, people responded swiftly and en masse. Protests of up to seven hundred thousand people brought Kiev to a standstill. Peaceful demonstrators camped out for months through a bitter winter in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, a square in the city center, until government forces attacked them in February, killing almost a hundred people and wounding more than a thousand. Amid international outrage, Yanukovych fled to Russia.
By the time I arrived, Kiev was calm, and Maidan Nezalezhnosti had been transformed into a living memorial. The Heavenly Hundred, the civilians who’d died in the February attacks, were commemorated with individual shrines decorated with flowers, helmets, and gas masks, which lined the street that ran between the October Palace and the silver windows of the Globe Shopping Center. The violence had moved east, where ill-equipped Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers fought Russian soldiers and Ukrainian separatists. A Malaysian Airlines passenger flight had recently been shot down as it traveled over the region, and Russia and Ukraine were both saying the other was responsible.
The fiery surges of hope and frustration that fueled the revolution had been dampened back to the despondence I remembered from the nineties. People’s fears about their future and that of their country, the safety of their soldiers, and the instability of the hryvnia, which had lost sixty percent of its value since the fighting began, clouded the city’s collective brain. I didn’t need to speak Ukrainian to know what was discussed on the street. I was exhausted for days after my arrival, and I attributed my lethargy to jet lag until I recognized that I was at the mercy of something heavier. Leaving the apartment meant having to muscle through Ukraine’s drab, thick grief, a despair that was both fresh and too familiar to its citizens.
Natasha loaned me her homey apartment for a month, and it became my refuge, even when the kitchen ceiling leaked for a week. The building, like all of the apartment buildings it was connected to along the block, was caked in grime, its European flourishes worn and chipped. On the ground floor was a restaurant badly fashioned after a traditional English pub.
I was under the care of my cousin Larissa, Lana’s daughter. She’d gone to Kiev for graduate school a decade earlier and stayed to work in performance art and cultural criticism. She acknowledged that Ukraine could be very frustrating, but said she found the daily struggle of life gratifying and visceral, and felt her work in its small artistic and activist communities was more significant than anything she’d be doing in the States.
I had a list of people to meet who’d known my father or worked with him. Some I’d contacted before I arrived, and others I hoped to find while I was there.
My Dead Parents Page 24
