Dust
by Diane Dees
On September 14, I drove the 55 miles from my rural south Louisiana home to Baton Rouge to visit what is, for all practical purposes, my mother's grave. In 1997, she was cremated, and her remains placed in a box. A tiny portion of those remains was dropped into the Thames in her native London; the rest were worked into the fertile soil of one of Baton Rouge's most beautiful gardens.
There is something clean about cremation. The survivors don't fantasize about a decaying body, or imagine ghoulish eye sockets staring into eternity from a horror movie skeleton. The body has been transformed by heat into rubble that is reminiscent of volcanic ash, and contains both a pebble-like substance, and a dust that covers any surface that is near.
September 14 was, of course, the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the victims of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Resisting urges to vomit whenever I saw the horrific photographs of the nightmare scene that used to be the World Trade Center, I automatically thought of childhood stories about the Blitzkrieg. Someone would leave the oppressive safety of the bomb shelter and be blown to pieces in a moment, my mother told me. Parts of the city were complete rubble. Hitler's soldiers buried people alive.
The British, of course, thought they were invincible. And when they turned on their radios and heard Lord Haw-Haw's obscenities, they were not demoralized, only sickened. A veil of dust covered London, and the sounds of falling bombs became familiar background noise, as the lightening war flashed horror in the sky over St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey.
The stories my mother told me were not appropriate stories to tell a child. I had nightmares about Nazi soldiers, armed only with shovels, searching for victims to bury in spontaneously dug graves. My mother also told me that one of Chopin's more sinister etudes was the musical story of a man who has been buried alive, and who is pounding on his casket, hoping in vain for someone to hear him and let him out
My mother's obsession with images of suffocating death was probably connected, in part, to her early life, which was one of hardship and cruelty. But it was also a consequence of being Jewish and having survived the Blitz. There is no way for most of us to understand what it was like to live in London in 1939 and 1940. There is no way for most Americans to know what it is like to live in Northern Ireland, or Israel, or any of the many places which are under siege considerably more often than they are at peace. That is because we have compartmentalized our own history of terrorism into discreet incidents or eras. The bombing of black churches, the blowing up of the federal building in Oklahoma City: We see these acts as either "history" or as the isolated acts of a few insane people.
But the scale and intensity of the September incident is so powerful that we cannot find a big enough box to put it in, let alone try to close the lid. In addition to feeling revulsion over the deaths and injuries of September 11, many of us also have a lifelong love for New York City, and the sight of well-planned destruction at one of her pulse points is heartbreaking. If New York is indeed the center of the world, then those of us along the innermost circumference are wounded in ways we don't know how to describe.
The garden where my mother's remains are interred is part of a church, and a few of the church members--men and women of great kindness-- watch over the rose that is planted on her grave. Caldwell Pink, a wild rose from Texas, is practically indestructible, as roses go. Long ago, my mother's bones became one with the leaves, pine needles and Louisiana soil that feed the delicate pink blooms.
As I stood near the rose on the morning of September 14, I thought about the fine dust of her bones, and I remembered what a peculiar sensation it was to hold those pulverized bones in my hand, then scatter them onto the garden plot. The dust clung to my skin, and settled on the pages of the prayer book as I made a confused attempt to read my way out of the dust of my inner chaos.
It is like the dust that covered London in World War II, and the dust that still covers New York. Dust tells us not only that there is nothing left, but something more chilling that something was indeed once there. The real becomes the unreal in a sudden story of material fragility, told by generations of humans who cannot understand the boundaries of reality.
I left Baton Rouge and entered the sometimes mesmerizing traffic of the Interstate highway, with my car radio tuned to the NPR station. While I listened to reports of the tragedy, I suddenly became overtaken by a totally irrational fear that I would arrive home to find my house broken into. In my mind's eye, I saw my front door bashed in, and my possessions shattered and spread across the floor.
Though I understood the source of my fantasy, I couldn't make the fear go away. Images of wartime London, the World Trade Center, and my mother's bones floated before my mind's eye like particles from an exploded dream.
I drove to my house, and found it intact, its contents arranged exactly as they had been when I left for Baton Rouge. I locked the door and made a decision not to turn on the television news. But the dust was everywhere, and before I could devise a plan, it was inside my lungs, suffocating me.
Diane E. Dees is a psychotherapist and writer in Louisiana. Her
essays and short stories have appeared in many publications. Diane writes
a column for *Moondance* and is a regular contributor to Freezerbox.com.
She and her husband, Orvin, are the webmasters of Princess Café,
a virtual rock and roll restaurant.
websites: www.princesscafe.com, www.dedspace.blogspot.com