10/30: Places where Mum’s ashes are (part 2)

Sand and sea, everywhere and nowhere

Spring 2016

We waited until the spring to scatter the ashes, decided to mark her missing birthday with a pilgrimage to Ainsdale Sands, on the coast north of Liverpool. Ainsdale Sands is a wide, flat beach with golden sands and big skies. Walk north along the beach and you’ll reach Southport. Walk south, and the beach changes name from Ainsdale Sands to Formby Beach to Crosby Beach (where Anthony Gormley’s Another Place sculpture stand, 100 human figures cast in iron, all staring out to sea), before disappearing into the Liverpool docklands. Walk inland and you’ll find yourself in a maze of sand dunes, one of the largest areas of wild dunes left in Britain and a national nature reserve. There’s a pine woodland too, home to red squirrels.

Ainsdale Sands is a place Mum visited often as a child, her father driving their car down onto the beach itself before setting up camp for the day. The photograph above is one of my favourites of Mum as a child and was taken there. Like me, Mum grew up on the coast, the fortunes of the town and city we each lived in tied to the sea. For her, Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s was still a city of maritime trade, one of the most important ports in England. For me, the North Wales coast in the 1980s and 1990s was a series of slightly decaying tourist towns that came alive every summer and sank into a quiet hibernation each winter. 

In spring 2016, I came to Ainsdale Sands with my dad and brother, my husband and toddler son, my mum’s sisters and one of my uncles. It was a still, clear day, the sky pearl grey above us, seagulls calling noisily. I was 8 months pregnant with the child conceived somewhere in the two week period between Mum’s death and her funeral the previous summer. The fine soft sand of the dunes had been a challenge, my sense of balance increasingly uncertain and and my feet slipping in the sand, invisible beneath the globe of my belly.

Once again, Dad’s first thought was to bury the ashes. It felt right: midway between the land and the sea, between her birthplace and the home she made in North Wales. Looking out to sea, we could see the Welsh mountains in the distance, and the same wind turbines also visible from the beach five minutes walk from my childhood home. Dad scraped out a shallow hole in the sand and unscrewed the lid of the green plastic urn. We took it in turns to scoop up a handful of the ashes and place them carefully into the hole. Even my toddler son, solemn faced, took his turn.

It suddenly felt wrong. We were putting her down into the dark. Not to lie amongst soil and plants as the ashes Dad had scattered in the garden did, but in sand, which is essentially very, very small fragments of rock. Just as biologically inert as the ashes themselves. There’s no life there. I felt like we were condemning her to a kind of suspended animation, a place under the ground where no time would pass, where nothing would change. 

I can’t remember if I asked permission, but I took the urn and walked down to the sea. The tide was in so it was less than 100 metres away, my wellies sinking slightly in the wet sand. The sun broke through the clouds. I could hear the soft drag of the waves on the sand. The air smelt like spring. I took another handful of ashes and tossed them high, a dark constellation suspended against the pale sky for a moment before scattering down to the water, sinking and dissolving into the sea. I exhaled a deep breath as they disappeared. Mum was in the world now, rather than buried under it. Everywhere and nowhere.

I’m so glad I scattered those ashes in the sea. Glad that my dad and brother joined me and also scattered some onto the water. Now I can feel close to Mum every time I’m by the sea, whether it’s the Irish Sea during visits to my childhood home or the North Sea on day trips from my current home. 

Now

We haven’t scattered all of Mum’s ashes. Some of them remain in that dark green plastic urn on the mantelpiece in the front room of my childhood home. I’m not sure what we’re waiting for. Maybe Dad’s still not ready to let her go, still wants to keep her close. Maybe my brother and I want to feel like both our parents are still in that house, that when we’re there we can spend time with both of them. 

We might be waiting for another spring day, another missing birthday, to scatter the remaining ashes on Conwy Mountain. Not far from her home, another favourite walk of hers. It’s a hill really, rather than a mountain, a steep climb up from the walled town and then out onto a high place overlooking the sea. Another place where it feels right to release her, a place where she can be free. But we’ve left it too late for us all to make that pilgrimage. Dad’s in his mid 70s now, his knees aren’t up to the uneven ground, the steep climb. If we do it, it will only be my brother and me, perhaps my children too. A strange meeting between Mum and the grandson she never knew.

We might also be waiting for another death. Dad has talked about having some of her ashes buried with him, when he dies. We talked a lot about wills and probate and lasting power of attorney in the first few years after Mum’s death. We were determined to do things differently, to be better prepared for Dad’s death. At least in practical terms - I’m not sure you can ever really emotionally prepare yourself for a parent’s death. But somehow those conversations gradually trickled away to nothing. Now, with the date of Dad’s death inevitably closer than it was then, it feels too difficult to start those conversations up again. I know he wants a woodland burial, I know he’d like some of Mum’s ashes to be buried with him, but I don’t know whether that’s possible.

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