Eating Ashes

I often wonder where I was in the commuter dance when my dad died. Perhaps it happened as I stood shoulder to shoulder with the other sleepy passengers on the NYC subway barreling towards 125th street. Balancing ourselves back and forth like low tide waves, we waited patiently. Doors opening and closing, people coming in and out, we made involuntary eye contact with one another as we rode the car uptown. 
I like to think that I felt something, some indication, that he was gone. When I tried to retrace my steps that day—November 20, 2014—I estimated he had died by the time I paid for my coffee at 6:34 a.m. in the frenetic race from the cash register to the train tracks. Still, I wonder when his silver hair stopped moving with the rhythm of his laughter. 
My Dad was a great father for adults, but not really for children. My memories of him as I grew up in Monterrey are filled with car rides, windows down, his arm out as he chain smoked, the aroma of the cigarette first lit I love. He would reach over and place his big, chunky tan hand on my knee and smile.
Although he rarely tried to play with me, he did once while I was shooting some basketball in my aunt’s retirement complex during one of our visits. While the adults grilled, I was left to entertain myself, which included peeking into other people’s windows. Walking towards the basketball court during one of his cigarette breaks, Dad put down his cigarette, gesturing to pass him the ball as if he was getting ready to show me a trick he had been practicing. Dribbling away from me, showing off his lack of skill, he still looked proud. Running around him, I could hear his breathing getting heavy. With one hand blocking me, I tried tackling him, pushing his arm away.  But his thick body felt like iron. Just when I was about to get closer to the ball, he stood up straight and dropped it. 
“¡Ay wey!” damn, he said, hands on his waist looking up at the sky trying to catch his breath. 
“¿Estás bien?” I asked him. 
He nodded and walked to the nearest bench to sit down, sweat pouring off his face. Then he picked his cigarette up.  There would be no more of that. 
He became a father for the fourth time when he and my mom were shocked by the pregnancy with me when he was in his late 40s, a smoker, tequila drinker, and a prime rib lover. I was only 25 when I lost him. But I had been preparing for my parents’ death for a long time. I knew they were much older than my friends’ parents and in some cases could practically be their grandparents. My oldest sibling was 20 by the time I was born in ’89 and had his first child when I was in the first grade and couldn't yet write my full name. 
As a young family in the 1970s, my parents and siblings moved from Monterrey to Mexico City to a beautiful apartment where my Dad worked for a big company. “We even had a chauffeur,” my brother Martin said one night over dinner. Playing around with the rice left on my plate, I listened carefully. I couldn’t believe it was the same family I was part of. “Do you remember the white Maverick?" my brother Adrian asked. “What Maverick?” I asked, confused. “Mom used to drive a white Maverick convertible looking like Jane Fonda,” he said. I couldn’t believe it. We had a Tsuru Nissan that was left by my grandfather. There was nothing convertible about it other than me wishing to convert it to anything else when she drove it around my rich friends. Listening to their stories, I felt like I was late to the party. 
When I was 11, I was visiting a friend’s house. Her younger brothers and sisters running around, music playing in the background while her parents laughed in the kitchen. It was as if I could feel youth floating in the air. My house, although it had its moments of chatter, was usually still, everyone busy with their own lives. Spending a lot of time by myself, I became very familiar with silence. Later on at that playdate, my friend's mom took us to a sports club they belonged to while she attended her salsa class. There was something about seeing my friend’s young mother attending a dance class that made me feel incredibly sad. I felt for the first time what would continue to haunt me: the shorter time my mom and dad had to live compared to this youthful mother. 
When I got home I ran upstairs to shower, the easiest way to escape when I wanted to cry. I could hear my mom knocking on the door “¿Mafer (her pet name for me), estás llorando? ¿Qué pasó?” She had a sixth sense for my sadness even before I knew I wanted to cry. I couldn’t even keep my own feelings to myself. I was always discovered. 
Not wanting to tell her she was old and that I wish she danced salsa like the young moms at the sports club, I didn’t say anything. Giving up on finding out what was wrong, she tried to cheer me up “¡Acuérdate que tenemos un regalo que va a llegar a esta familia! ¡Dieguito ya casi nace!” She reminded me that Dieguito was about to be born. 
He was my brother’s second child, which made me feel worse. My mother was a grandma for the second time when I was 11 years old. I cried harder. 
Over the decades, thanks to my siblings who loved gadgets and new technology, my parents were encouraged to text through WhatsApp. Dad and I moved from writing long emails to each other to quick messages, in an effort to shorten the distance between me living in the US and him back home in Monterrey. I would have a message from him, always an early riser, waiting by the time I woke up. “Good Morning Sunshine!”The day he died, I was already in the subway when I noticed I hadn’t gotten anything from him and so wrote “Good morning Dad! Love you!” But I got no answer. The day got busy. When my brother Martin called at lunchtime I took the call in the corner of the lunch room. 
“¿Ya supiste?” he asked.
“¿Qué?” 
“Se murió mi papá” Dad died. 
I watched as everyone ate their lunch in a busy chatter. “My Dad died, ” I said casually, as if I was asking someone to pass me a napkin. I felt guilty for causing the sudden silence and their confused looks as my news caught them mid-chew. 
When I turned 20, my dad and I started to smoke cigarettes together. The first time I had just tearfully announced to my parents I had something to tell them. “No me digas a mi, diselo a tu papá” Mom didn’t want to hear the news first, she wanted me to tell my Dad first. She already suspected that the news was about me dating a woman. It was during my first winter break from college in Rhode Island in the fall of 2009, when I met them in New York City at the Radisson on Lexington Avenue. They had just arrived from Mexico and I couldn’t keep the news to myself any longer. We rode the elevator downstairs in silence until we got to the bar. This was mom’s way of giving Dad the emotional responsibility of the news she suspected so it wouldn’t just fall on her. Whenever I called home, he would say, “I’ll let you two talk about women stuff,” which usually involved dating, periods, and gossip. Now here I was wishing the elevator didn’t have that many floors as I braced myself to talk to him about sexuality and love for the first time. We were both tense. Ding! The elevator finally opened to the bar.
I had never shared a drink with him before either. Actually, I didn’t drink before moving to the US, but six months away from home changed that. I was surprised by his drink of choice for the conversation: mojitos, as if we were in the middle of a remote island and not in the freezing cold of New York. I held back tears as I tried to sound coherent. “I think I’m in love with Caitlin.” 
He knew who she was. We had been assigned roommates a few months earlier and had a rocky start. I had mentioned that she drank and smoked weed, that she was rowdy and chaotic. “Quién sabe qué madre parió a esa muchachita” he said at the end of my phone call “no te le acerques.” Don't get close to her. But time had passed, and it turned out I was actually wrong about her. My parents were relieved we had actually become good friends. He took a big sip of his drink, crunching on some ice. “¿Enamorada? ¿Qué sabes tú de estar enamorada?” What do you know about being in love? he asked, as if he had pulled that line from a cliche rom com. “You just got here! You are away from home, you feel alone. It makes sense that you have found comfort in someone's presence. ¿Pero amor? ¡María Fernanda, por favor!” 
“Aparte te voy a decir una cosa, tú no viniste aquí para estar haciendo pendejadas, viniste aquí a estudiar, ¿Quieres que te regrese?” I hadn’t come here to do stupid, shit and his threat of sending me back to Mexico felt real. He was getting angrier, as if one argument was fueling the next. His disappointment melted the ice in my drink I hadn’t touched. Others at the bar looked over at us and my dad’s theatrical movements of his arms, to make a point.
I was crying by this point. But he wasn’t done. “Just tell her thank you, but no thank you and that’s it, it's over.” As if he had helped me close a business deal. When we finished our drinks,we went outside to smoke. My dad wore a felt hat and mittens in the Manhattan cold but somehow lit his cigarette and cupped his wool-covered hand around it: very debonair. When I had asked him for a cigarette before, he would scold me. “¡Nombre estas bien mal!” as he waved his hand in the air to shoo me away. This time, he turned towards me to light my cigarette. I felt safe there, our cigarettes smoldering. I also felt like an adult, finally catching up to all of them. 
That was five years before he died. The plane ride home to his funeral was long. Taking the red eye left me exactly with that; the most swollen, red eyes I have ever had. I cried the whole way as the flight attendant kept refilling my whiskey glass. When I showed up the next morning to the funeral, people commented on how strong I was because I wasn’t crying. I had already shed every tear left in me and then some. The time had come, not when I had anticipated, yet I was not completely taken by surprise. For once, the dragging of a thought had been useful. Thinking of my parents’ deaths had prepared me for this.
Walking into the kitchen the next morning was worse than the actual funeral. The familiar silence of my youth was usually broken by my dad ruffling the newspaper in the mornings while everyone else slept. “¿Quieres café?” Was always his first question. Eating pan dulce, he would go back to his reading as I poured myself a cup of coffee and ate cereal. The kitchen table was now filled with leftovers and funeral flowers, everyone still asleep, the coffee maker unplugged and the silence unbroken. 
He was never comfortable in the heat; even though he’d grown up in it. I’m the same. When I get out of the shower, I’m already sweating. Just like me, his favorite weather was a New England winter. We spent some of those together when he and my mom visited me in Newport over the holidays. We both loved the town’s charm, its sunsets, the ocean and the crisp air that awakens all of your senses. Dad would write in his emails “muero por que llegue el día para sentarnos con unos tragos y nuestros cigarros en Newport.” He couldn’t wait to arrive in Newport so we could sit together and share our usual drinks and cigarettes. As soon as they landed, I would receive them with a cheese board and their favorite bottle at that time, Wild Turkey.Uncorking the red wax, we would pour ourselves a glass and sit outside in the freezing cold, airways open, tasting the whiskey to its last note, inhaling cigarette smoke. “¡Ah!” He would exclaim pressing his lips, “¿Qué tal eh? ¡Aquí en Newport con mi chiquita!” Adding an extra pop on the “P,” mocking his own accent. He had finally made it to his favorite place. I knew he wished to have moved there, but he never made it. 
So it was natural that when a big bag of ashes were given to us, mom said to me “me voy a llevar las cenizas de tu papá en la maleta y allá vemos que hacemos con ellas.’' Mom was packing Dad’s ashes in her luggage so we could figure out what to do with them when she and my brother arrived in Newport. 
My mom brought my favorites when she visited: from fresh tortillas to carne seca, never fearful of getting caught. So she wasn’t concerned with smuggling my dad in a ziplock bag. He arrived wrapped in my mom's underwear and covered by her shirts. After a couple rounds of whiskey and the usual cheese board I prepared for their arrival, we discussed what we would do with him. 
“¿Y si las dejamos en su banca favorita?” What about spreading his ashes on his favorite bench? said my brother, quickly adding as if changing his mind “¿Y si nos cachan?” What happens if someone sees us?
“A mi me gustaría que fuera con el amanecer.” I would like it if it was during a sunrise, my mom said.
“Podemos ir al Cliffwalk y aventar las cenizas en el agua muy temprano en la mañana cuando la marea esté baja. Y así nos turnamos.” I suggested the Cliff Walk, where we could walk down the rocks and spread his ashes early in the morning during low tide. We can take turns, I said, thinking of the fun I had on those rocks. It never crossed my mind that it would be my dad’s final resting spot. 
The next morning, we got up in the dark and walked the paved road along the water. My mom went down the steep rocks with no problem even though she’d had knee surgery. I tried my best to remember my route where there were rocks perfect for sitting. The slimy rocks made the grip difficult, but somehow in the dark we were able to orient ourselves. 
It was still. As we sat on the rocks, we waited for the sliver of sun to peak through the dense clouds. Though the sky threatened snow, the red sun pierced through, letting in enough light for us to see where we were. My mom had been holding Dad on her lap like a child, wrapped around her scarf. I could see glimmers of her tears streaming down, combined with snot. After a few minutes, she unraveled Dad. As precious as he had been to us, he now looked like silver sand on the beach.  She clenched her fingers in his ashes so hard her knuckles turned nearly white. Walking toward the water and with a throw whose force startled me, she set him free. I watched as my own stream of tears fell down, unable to gauge if it was mine or the rocks' wetness I was sitting on. When it was my brother's turn, he gave me the camera to hold and used one hand to steady himself and the other to release my dad into the water he loved so much. 
The ashes went everywhere, not only in the water but in our hands, on the rocks, on our clothes. Then my turn came. I tried my best to throw him farther, always the baby in the family. We grabbed the corner of the bag and spread what was left of him while the clouds lifted and the sun poked through creating a star that blinded us. 
Then, we did what my dad would have wanted: have a drink. Back at the place we were renting, my brother lifted the empty bag. “Look,” he said. “We spread them all!”  As he lifted the bag, the little left of him escaped, spreading all over the table. We stood there looking at dad, not knowing what to do.
Then my mom put her drink down. “¡No lo desperdicien!” Don’t waste him! she said. She licked her finger, then ran it over the ashes.  She was known for doing the same when the smallest drop of her tequila spilled, making everyone around her laugh at her efforts of saving the last drop. We followed, licking our fingers covered in ashes. I tried to make my mom come back to her senses of what we were doing, but grief can make you do crazy things. So I left her alone. 
I let the whiskey wash away the tiny little specks between my teeth. Time hadn’t been fair, even if I’d prepared for this all my life. I struggled as I opened the window, letting the North East wind take the rest of what was left of him. As the ashes lifted, the memories of us dusting ourselves after having shared a cigarette covered me. My glass had some whiskey left combined with the specks of dad. Standing there in silence, I drank it not in one gulp, but sipped slowly, prolonging my goodbye.