THE LAST LAUGH

Miami Herald, The (FL)
March 5, 1989
Author: TOM SHRODER Herald Tropic Editor

None of us had been on a boat since my dad sold the outboard to the yardman for a thousand bucks. My brother and I rented a nice 26-foot cabin cruiser on the creek and putted home through the channels we'd cruised as kids. Nothing is ever as familiar as the paths of childhood, or as odd as retracing them when childhood has become a myth. We docked behind the house and the others climbed aboard without a word. Our stepmother appeared a minute later carrying a small cardboard box. We all looked at it, knowing what it must be, but not quite believing it. There was an awkward moment when everyone tried to look anywhere but at the box, or into another set of eyes. When I couldn't let it go on any longer, I took the box from her hands and put it in a cubby hole in the cabin. It was heavier than I expected.

We hadn't ever discussed exactly what we were going to do, and no one broke the silence now as my brother took the boat out Midnight Pass and due west into the Gulf at about two-thirds throttle. The engine droned in the light surf. My stepmother, wearing big purple sunglasses, stared into the spray at the stern and worried the ring on her left hand.

T.M Shine begins today's cover story about death with a quote from LaRochefoucauld. "One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun." The reality of death is so blinding, that most of us not only avoid a direct glance, but shut our eyes and bury our face in our hands and flee. We don't want anything to do with it. We hold our breath in its presence. We avert our eyes even from the trappings of death. Maybe that's why it's so easy to move those high ticket items in the funeral homes. Nobody wants to test drive a casket. We don't even want to look at one. We just want to write the check and run. The bigger the check, the better. It helps pay off the guilt for keeping the death of someone you loved at arm's length.

Maybe that's why it is so funny, and so profound, to see Shine move among the objects of death and touch them as if they were just objects. Shine claims he is an ordinary man, but he has an extraordinary set of eyes, and through them we can see death's brilliant aura.

Reading his story is such a . . . relief. Nothing needs to be examined, handled, laughed at, more than our attitudes toward death. Nothing needs irreverence as badly. I've seen widows suffocate in the reverential silence that surrounds death like a vacuum.

My father had a horror of undertakers and funeral homes. A horror of the falseness of saccharin words and the obscenity of huge expense. So here he was, the only physical reality he had ever had, or ever would have as far as I was concerned, in this cardboard box. The boat had stopped in the middle of a perfect disk of aqua ocean and the motors silenced in the lap and splash of the waves. Another awkward moment. I took the box and opened it. Another box inside, black plastic.

I stood there, afraid to open it. I considered throwing the whole thing in the ocean, but what if it floated? I pulled on a narrow seam in the plastic, and it gave. A plastic bag, tied with a twist of paper-coated wire, containing seven pounds of ash and crushed bone. I said some words, opened the bag and emptied it over the deck rail. The ash hit the water and bloomed into a gray cloud floating in a liquid blue sky. Someone began dropping roses, one by one, to float above the cloud. The boat drifted in a mist of silence as heavy as any I've ever felt.

Suddenly it seemed as if there would be no way to go on from this moment, no way to turn the engines and head the boat to shore. Just then my stepbrother made a sudden movement. His shirt fluttered to the deck, he stepped up on the rail and dove among the roses and the blue water. The evil spell had been broken, and we all knew it. I jumped out of my shirt and followed, then my brother, and pretty soon all of us were floating among the flowers, steeped in the man we'd loved.

Going home, we laughed.

Memo: FROM THE EDITOR
Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1989 The Miami Herald