On the ship I boarded at the bottom of Argentina with the three men I love most, I put my socks in a drawer, my sweaters on a shelf and my mother’s ashes in the cupboard above the minifridge. They were in a clear plastic bag inside a blue plastic box I’d ordered from Amazon, emblazoned with stickers that said “Cremated Remains” and “Fly Safe.”
This would be my third trip to Antarctica. The first was in 2016, from New Zealand to the Ross Sea, at the beginning of a relationship with a man who led commercial voyages to remote regions. In a journey of five weeks, we had days and days of big seas, the swells sometimes topping 30 feet. Tending bar in the evenings, I developed a technique for mixing simple cocktails with my feet braced wide, moving my pouring hand with the roll of the ship. Discomfort was a small price to pay for witnessing the Ross, a seldom-visited part of Antarctica 1,800 miles south of New Zealand. When I remember what I saw — a full moon rising over the Transantarctic Mountains, their snowy summits pink with midnight dusk; emperor penguins; steam-breathing volcanoes; explorers’ huts, still intact; tabular icebergs the size of cities — my chest still constricts with something piquant and not easily identifiable, maybe longing.
So glorious was the Ross that when I accepted a magazine assignment to travel to the Antarctic Peninsula in 2019, I had snobbishly low expectations. The Peninsula is separated from South America only by the relatively narrow 600-mile Drake Passage, and despite the Drake’s notoriously stormy weather, it remains by far the most accessible part of Antarctica and the destination for an overwhelming majority of visitors. I thought of it as Antarctica Lite. But I could bring a guest. By then my mother had been living with chronic lymphocytic leukemia for 11 years, and despite a recent setback, she really wanted to go. Her doctor timed her treatments so she could be away for a month, time we spent mostly on a cruise ship, bouncing down the Chilean coast to Antarctica and back up to Buenos Aires.
One morning we awoke to a grayscale landscape: rock, ice, cloud. In the photo I took of Mom on our balcony, her hands are balled into fists, pressed to her heart, her smile tremulous. When we first stepped ashore, she said she wanted to kiss the briny pebbles under her boots. She wanted to do everything. She hiked in the snow; she kayaked. She fell in love with penguins, especially the saucy, knee-high gentoos with thick white markings above their eyes like Ernest Borgnine brows. I was chastened by the Peninsula’s austere, extreme beauty. Here, like the Ross, was a place that would kill you without noticing, a place that made you feel tiny and vulnerable, its fearsome grandeur offering access to the sublime. When we sailed north, away, Mom embraced me in our cabin and cried. When she got home, she ordered a vanity license plate for her car that read: “GENTOO1.”
What a gift that time was, just the two of us, a year before Covid and three years before she died. We hadn’t traveled as a pair since the late ’90s. The summer before I started high school, she’d gotten us Eurail passes and let me choose where we went. When I led us on a multiday pilgrimage into the Swiss Alps to visit a monastery I’d seen in a 40-year-old issue of National Geographic, she didn’t bat an eye. A year later, deep in a Russian history obsession, I talked her into taking me to St. Petersburg for the cathedral reburial of Czar Nicholas II and his family amid clanging bells and a procession of hearses along the Neva. Wanting to see a place, she taught me, is good enough reason to go.
Late one night in September 2020, Mom texted me. She’d just finished reading the proofs of my third novel, “Great Circle,” then eight months from publication. The book is about a fictional pilot named Marian Graves whose remains end up in the Southern Ocean.
“‘G.C.’ is a memorable, stick-to-your heart story,” she wrote, as though I’d asked her to supply a blurb for the book jacket. “It inspired a very personal decision, which I think I’m ready to tell you when I see you next.” (Smiling-face-with-hearts emoji.)
I had no idea what she could mean. A few weeks later I drove down to San Diego from Los Angeles and sat with her in her sewing room, her sanctum sanctorum, stuffed with fabric destined for quilts. On the wall hung a framed photo of the two of us on an icy beach, gentoos in the background. Mom’s eyes shone and her voice broke as she told me that “Great Circle” had made her more comfortable with the idea of death. “And so,” she said, “when I die, I want my ashes scattered off Antarctica with Marian’s.”
What I wish I had done was ask Mom what being in that water would mean to her. Instead, my immediate, unflattering gut reaction was that Antarctica was my thing. I had been fascinated with it since I was a kid. I had had a life-changing romance there. I had written “Great Circle.” I also knew such a dispersal wouldn’t be simple. A dense mesh of rules and regulations governs Antarctica. Most fundamental is the Antarctic Treaty, which has been in effect since 1961, a miracle of international cooperation and foresight that declared the whole continent “shall be used for peaceful purposes only” and be dedicated to nature and science. Much hashing-out has ensued over the decades, and the body that oversees tourism — the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO) — has seen the complexity of its task skyrocket along with visitor numbers, from around 6,400 when it was established in 1991 to 118,000 last year. While IAATO helps prevent greedy and careless humans from doing stupid and destructive things (e.g., scattering ashes willy-nilly), its bureaucracy can be formidable.
I wish I’d acknowledged that I found her idea beautiful. Instead I went straight for the practicalities. “It’s illegal to scatter ashes on land,” I said. “But I think you could do it in the ocean.”
She waved her hands. “Sure, fine. I’m not going to die tomorrow, anyway.”
That was the last we ever spoke of it. She died suddenly, 647 days later, on July 3, 2022, of a cerebral hemorrhage caused by complications of her leukemia.
With 130 passengers, our ship, the Greg Mortimer, was smallish among its peers, dwarfed by the three other tourist vessels in port at Ushuaia, Argentina. I liked its unromantic name in this region of gorgeously evocative ones: Tierra del Fuego, Cape Horn, Deception Island, Greg.
As we got underway through the glassy-smooth Beagle Channel, my husband, Tim, lay in our cabin doing a crossword puzzle on his iPad and waiting to get seasick. Ever since a long-ago bachelor-party sport-fishing debacle, he had been convinced that any contact with the ocean would render him violently and irreversibly ill. My father and my brother, Matthew, had the next cabin, through a communicating door we never opened. Amped and restless, I bustled off to explore. Matthew was on the top deck, and we stood together at the railing. All around were the brooding, wild islands of Tierra del Fuego — Chile to starboard and Argentina to port. Magellanic penguins porpoised in and out of the sea like winged rugby balls. It was January, the height of Southern Hemisphere summer, but we were in down jackets.
“This is where Mom first saw penguins,” I told Matthew. I had this urge throughout the trip: to play tour guide, beckoning the others into my memories of Mom in this place, wishing they could have witnessed the deep pleasure she’d taken in it.
Soon after Mom’s death, I’d brought up the whole Antarctica-ashes thing with Dad and Matthew, hoping maybe she had also mentioned it to them. She had not, and they reacted with politely tempered incredulity, as though I’d announced she’d been speaking to me through the vacuum cleaner.
Later, musing, my father said, “We’ll have to think about where to scatter Mom’s ashes.”
I was immediately annoyed. Hadn’t he been listening? Did he not believe me? For that matter, why had Mom left me with the I know this sounds crazy, but … task of conveying her wishes? I repeated, sharply, what I’d said about Antarctica, adding, “Remember?” Not until much later would I understand how easily my anger could feed off my grief. Nor did I consider that my father might have been hurt by his wife of 52 years confiding in me but not in him.
He blinked. “Yeah, but I didn’t know how serious she was.”
She had seemed serious to me, I said. I described the emotional announcement in her sewing room. Her idea might have been outlandish, but it was the only specific after-death wish she’d expressed. I didn’t see how we could brush it off.
Dad stared at me, amusement seeping through his skepticism. In my family, fraught moments are perfectly valid opportunities for jokes. “Well,” he said, “it’s a good thing she’s being cremated because otherwise right now we’d be putting you on a tramp steamer bound for the southern seas.”
A year passed after Mom’s death before I began considering how to get the ashes to the Antarctic, another before I began trying to plan in earnest and 18 months more before we went, this January. There had been dead ends along the way. Expedition companies were leery of my plan to write about the ashes because they would have to trust me to accurately convey their compliance with IAATO’s rules. Matthew was easy to enlist, and Dad surprised me, after some hemming and hawing, by signing on, too. (Tim, I coerced.) While I was glad for the company and warmed by the idea that Mom’s loved ones would see Antarctica because of her, getting four people with four different travel styles to Antarctica upped the difficulty level by several orders of magnitude. “This wasn’t my idea!” I kept saying whenever anyone got frustrated with the complexities, but we all knew it might as well have been. I had taken Mom to Antarctica in the first place, and I’d relayed her wishes and vouched for their sincerity. By telling me, and only me, Mom had put me squarely in charge.
I don’t think Dad, Matthew or I had fully comprehended how load-bearing my mother was within our family structure until we found ourselves left in the rubble. Rebuilding had taken time and painful effort. When my brother went through a challenging period, my father, in his 70s, took up the mantle of primary parent for the first time, flying to see him, calling me to worry and talk things through. I became the curator and disseminator of Mom’s stuff; the decider of what was for dinner; the host and grand arbiter of Christmas. Sometimes I chafed at gendered assumptions that certain responsibilities of the organizing/feeding/planning variety would naturally fall to me because I was the woman. I’d decided not to have children partly because I didn’t want to be a caretaker, but my rejection of that role had been easier when Mom — the apex caretaker — was alive. She’d been so good at taking care of us that, complacently, we’d thought we were taking care of ourselves, like toddlers helping in the kitchen.
The first night on the Greg Mortimer, our swells topped out at 12 feet, modest for the Drake Passage but enough for the ship to roll. I slept badly, worried that Tim would get sick or forget a cardinal rule of rough seas, which is not to hold onto any door jambs for balance, as doors can fly shut and break or sever your fingers. He’d never wanted to come on this trip and had dreaded it to the point of panic, but I strong-armed him into it because I selfishly wanted his company. Maybe I’d harbored a dream that one legacy of my mom’s request might be Tim discovering he loves the polar regions, as I do, despite his insistence that he would not.
We awoke the first morning from a barfless night, fingers intact, and stared at each other in wonder. Either a miracle had occurred, or the prescription anti-nausea patch behind his ear had worked. “I don’t even know who I am anymore,” he said.
“A natural born seafarer,” I said. He made a yuck face.
That afternoon, the expedition staff told me we needed to scatter the ashes before we passed through the Antarctic Convergence, the marine zone where very cold water coming from the south meets less cold sub-Antarctic waters. In practice, this meant we had to be north of 60 degrees south latitude, roughly the southern edge of the Convergence and exactly the northern edge of the area governed by the Antarctic Treaty and IAATO. And that meant we needed to disperse the ashes before the end of the day.
It was decided: 8:30 p.m., Deck 4, port-side aft. Before dinner, my father and I went to a lecture on marine mammals. Afterward, about Mom and her request, he said, “I always wished she’d told me because I would have tried to talk her out of it.”
“Probably,” I said, “that’s why she didn’t tell you.”
He smiled, rueful. “Probably.”
After dinner, I took the blue T.S.A.-approved travel box into our cabin’s bathroom and sat on the shower floor. I pulled out the heavy bag of ashes, stretched a hole in the plastic with my thumbs and emptied the white grit into a cardboard scattering tube with a perforated top (another Amazon funerary purchase). The blue box had traveled all the way from L.A. in my carry-on, every security check making my heart race like I was smuggling a kilo of cocaine. “Cinezas humanas,” I’d explained to the Argentine customs agents, proffering my mother’s death certificate. They asked what I was going to do with them. When I said I was going to go to Antarctica and throw them in the ocean, they’d shrugged me on my way.
In the United States, with very few exceptions, cremations take place in kilnlike incinerators called retorts, at temperatures high enough to combust human tissues into gases and particles. What’s left is not really ashes but bone, in chunks and fragments, and the residue of whatever casket was used. This is all poured into an industrial machine called a cremulator and pulverized into the grit and powder we call ashes. The term has the right redolence — dryness, aftermath, a gray and final alchemy — but both the word and the substance seem perhaps too inert and processed, eliding the truth of the profound transition that has occurred.
Cremation is a means of circumventing decay, of turning flesh into portable, dispersible remains. When you bury a body, you’re done with it, but ashes require another step, another decision. Do you bury them under a headstone, as my paternal grandparents had requested, so mourners have a place to leave flowers? Do you scatter them in a beloved forest, as my maternal grandparents wanted? You could forget them in a closet, or you could embark on a quest, a trial of perseverance and devotion, ending in a cold and faraway stretch of ocean.
Fifteen years ago in Bali, I watched an open-air cremation. Hundreds of people paraded through the streets of Ubud carrying elaborate pyres to a forest clearing where family members set them alight, first gently with incense sticks and later juicing the setup with blowtorches. At one point, as a pyre shifted and collapsed, a skeleton sat up in the flames, its skull blackened, fire between its ribs. The atmosphere was cheerful and festive. People slung their arms around one another and took selfies. The sense of camaraderie and collective ritual was thrilling. How amazing for the dead to be kept company, not shut behind the steel door of a retort in some anonymous industrial park, how enviable. My mother had been alone, but now we were with her. An impersonal process had transformed her to grit and dust, but we were about to carry out what she’d called “a very personal decision.” I felt the weight of her in my arms as I carried the cardboard tube down the ship’s long corridors. I felt the weight of ritual, too, solemn and comforting.
The evening was windy and golden when the four of us stepped out onto the deck, near the stern. The swells trailed veils of foam. When Mom imagined being scattered off Antarctica, I think she probably pictured the Peninsula’s mountains and glaciers, but this, the open ocean of 59 degrees south latitude, was the best we could do. The Antarctic Convergence has its own metaphorical weight. It’s a zone of transition and mixing, of upwelling nutrients that sustain an ecosystem. Through these waters, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current circles eastward, more powerful than any other ocean current, stirring together the southern waters of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Matthew stood wiping his eyes. Tim took photos. My father talked about how Mom’s request hadn’t made sense to him until he learned that Antarctica had eased her fear of death. “She never, ever wanted anything to do with the big ‘D,’” he said. But if Antarctica, or the idea of Antarctica, had given solace, then he understood.
I read the lines from “Great Circle” about Marian’s ashes, the lines Mom had read and claimed for herself: “She’s in the ocean now, as she was always meant to be. Most of her has come to rest, scattered, on the cold southern seafloor, but some of her smallest, lightest fragments, floating dust, are still being carried along by the currents.” I held the cardboard tube out over the railing, into the wind, and shook it. Heavier bits fell to the water while a powdery white plume blew out over the ship’s wake. Matthew and Dad took turns scattering, and when there wasn’t much left, I pulled the two halves of the tube apart and set the last of her free.
For months, when people had asked how I would feel after scattering the ashes, I always said, without hesitation, “Relieved.” But what I actually felt — sharp and unexpected — was loss.
By the time we left, I was eager, almost desperate, to shed the burden of it all. I had said many times to many people that if Mom had any inkling of what a colossal hassle she was saddling me with — logistics, expense, carbon guilt, sheepdog tasks like making sure the men all had travel insurance and waterproof pants — she would have instantly rescinded her request.
“But that’s part of what’s beautiful,” my friend Mika said. “Because she probably made choices to take up less space lots of times in her life.”
This knocked me back. Mom was a woman, a wife, a mother, a teacher, a middle child, a Midwesterner by upbringing, the daughter of a Unitarian minister and a kindergarten teacher — a perfect storm of nice-girl self-denial. Her way of living had been modest and grounded, which made her vision for her remains only more mysterious to me.
Grief is sneaky and shape-shifting and, like the proverbial elephant in the dark room, impossible to perceive in its entirety. But I’d thought of loss as more finite and external, a discrete event in which my living, present mother had been taken away and replaced with irrevocable absence. Until I shook the last of her physical being into the wind and water, I’d thought I was done losing her. In actuality, the unfinished obligation of her ashes had staved off a certain finality. The ashes had seemed like a burden when they’d really been a tether, held taut across death’s divide. Once I fulfilled my promise, that connection was severed. Clutching the empty cardboard scattering tube, I turned to Tim, crying, and said, “She’s really gone.” An obvious fact and yet a revelation. She could ask nothing else of me. I could give her nothing.
And there we were, the four of us, our jackets lightly powdered with ash and our mission accomplished, oddly enough still at the beginning of a trip to Antarctica.
We saw all the stuff: the mountains and the ice, the penguins and the seals. The sun set, but the sky stayed light. Humpback whales, once hunted almost to extinction in these waters, frolicked with their calves. A Canadian woman lost the meaty tip of her finger to a slamming door. Matthew and I did the polar plunge, jumping off the back of the ship into water so cold it felt like fire.
The four of us mostly kept to ourselves, partly because we’re not minglers and partly because explaining our reason for the trip proved to be a Whole Thing. My father haunted the decks, taking a million scenic photos with his iPhone 5. Tim gradually became famous among the staff members as word spread that he writes for “The Simpsons,” though we sensed bewilderment as well, that a person responsible for so much humor and fun could be so unenthusiastic about being in Antarctica.
“It’s insane to come all the way down here and not go outside,” I told him one morning when he chose to skip a wildlife-spotting outing on Zodiacs, the rugged, outboard-powered rafts used to get passengers off the ship.
“I’ve been outside!” he protested. “If it means a lot to you, I’ll go, but it’s not my thing.”
Exasperated, I went without him, convinced he was being stubborn and contrary and robbing himself of life’s Antarctic joys. But then, bouncing over choppy waves in a Zodiac and getting splashed in the face with freezing saltwater in order to see elephant seals lying like logs on a beach — absolutely my idea of a good time — I realized Tim had protected both of us by not coming. He would have been miserable, and his misery would have diminished my happiness. So he didn’t love Antarctica. So what. To come on the trip at all, certain as he was that he was condemning himself to death by seasickness, had been an act of bravery, his presence a declaration of devotion.
I had thought, when Mom died, that I would probably end up scattering the ashes alone. That would have been simpler. I would have fretted much less about travel arrangements and dinner conversation and whether the men were having a nice time and, if not, if they resented me for it. Simpler, but so sad. Sad to be the only one to remember the golden light on the sea and her ashes hanging in the air. Sad to return alone, on a ship of strangers, to a place where her joy and mine had amplified each other. It was an act of care that my father and brother didn’t let that happen. Their presence, too, signified devotion — not just to my mother but to me.
Now I am home, and Mom is still in the Southern Ocean, motes of her drifting over unknowable distances. I think she thought of being scattered in that faraway water as a means of self-erasure, the exchange of bodily cohesion for oneness with a place that moved her, but inevitably it was a statement of self, too. Her wish was a posthumous revision, an author’s note: “I was not quite the person you thought I was.”
A few months after she died, we had a normal sort of memorial service for her, with family and friends, eulogies and canapés. It was lovely and moving, a fitting way of honoring the woman we all knew. Antarctica was how we honored what we didn’t know.
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