For Mother’s Day, baby’s breath flung from the Santa Cruz Wharf. On Easter, yellow daffodils at Pleasure Point. On Christmas, a shot of tequila off the Baja coast. On Thanksgiving, I gave my mother-ocean a bouquet of purple tulips. I guess that’s the beauty of being fluid. I did not realize how quickly I would associate my mother’s body with all saline bodies of water. He was used to sharing the same bed, and when her bed moved, so did he. “Your great grandfather slept on his wife’s grave every night after she died,” my father used to tell us. All of the hyperbole about mother ocean, and mother earth, and the notion that what comes from the earth will become earth again, is a tangible reality and no longer a metaphor. I never considered that my connection to the ocean would be wed to my connection to my mother, who would, one day, live forever within it. I am flying away from my mother, the Puget Sound. While sitting at my gate at SeaTac airport, I felt a shift in my center of gravity. I did not expect her funeral to provide closure, and I did not imagine I’d care about the location of her remains, because none of this should have happened in the first place. I didn’t care to think much of wills, funerals, caskets, crematoriums and the like. I read the book Tuck Everlasting as a child and hoped beyond hope that we’d somehow all drink from the spring of life and death would not come for me or my family. She always liked the windows open at night, the Puget Sound will be the perfect temperature. My father worried if she would be too cold. We squirreled away her GPS coordinates so that we could come back and visit her again. On a crisp, clear, and sunlight-dappled morning one year ago, we boarded a passenger ferry, stood on the back of the car deck with the Seattle skyline in the background, and spread my beautiful mother’s ashes into the cold, jet-blue waters of the Puget Sound. My parents agreed that they wanted their ashes scattered from the Washington State Ferry, the vessel that carried them to and from fulfilling jobs and back to the family and idyllic island home they built together. Part of my childhood and some of my parent’s favorite years were spent living in the Pacific Northwest. My mom passed away in 2022 after battling ALS. It was the kind of assembly that nobody ever wants to have. Last year, our Scorpio gathering looked a whole lot different. One year we all went to see “Cats the Musical.” Another year we went on a coastal road trip. For as long as I can remember, our birthdays have been a collective experience. I share my own birthday with my deceased first dog Elmo, may he rest in peace. My father, two brothers, and sister-in-law all have their birthdays on the same day, with my mom’s just a few days later. My entire immediate family was born within ten days of one another. We’re all Scorpios, which may seem like bad luck to some but it’s never been like that for us. This week my family comes together to celebrate Scorpio season.
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