Burial at Sea

My father died suddenly and unexpectedly in July 1993, and we were not quite sure why. Just before Christmas a year and a half earlier, he had had emergency open heart surgery for valve replacement and bypass grafts, and he probably took his meds faithfully, but he refused to follow through with any sort of exercise program as his cardiologist recommended. During our usual Fourth of July family reunion he apparently picked up a cold, or the flu, or perhaps something that caused infection, we never knew. Mama took him to hospital and he died suddenly a day or so later. Mama and I were with him in the hospital when he had a sudden event, and I remember the physician saying, "I don't know what has happened, but it's catastrophic." He died a few minutes later, to our shock and my mother's total devastation. He was 82. His ashes have been in the columbarium at Holy Nativity. My mother died in July 2011 at age 99, and her ashes have been beside his.

In my mother’s will she asked that her ashes and my father’s ashes be mixed and scattered at sea, perhaps from John Carroll’s boat. We have looked toward a time when everyone in the family who wants to participate can be here, and the first opportunity will be when family are here during the Christmas holidays. That will be next week. The plan, weather permitting, is to scatter some ashes on Massalina Bayou in front of the house where we grew up, some on St. Andrews Bay in front of this house on West Beach Drive (then Bayview Avenue) that our grandparents built in 1912-1913, and some outside the Old Pass where my father’s brother Alfred died when the schooner Annie & Jennie wrecked in the storm in January 1918.

God willing, and the wind is from the north, and the Gulf and Bay don’t storm.

TW+