After eight and a half years, I finally managed to do it. Eight and a half years of postponements, tears, reluctance, and climbing over one grief obstacle after another, have come to an end. I finally managed to make the trip to Baltimore to scatter my mother's ashes.
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Mom had requested an unusual resting place: the finish line at one of her favorite race tracks. She was an avid fan of horse racing for almost 50 years. She could not go as often as she wanted to when I was living at home, but after I went away to college she went to the race track almost every weekend. After she retired she went during the week sometimes as well. She usually went to Laurel, since that was the closest big track, but she also went to Pimlico occasionally.
Pimlico Race Course is the home of the Preakness, the middle leg of the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing. She never missed a Preakness: it is the highlight of the racing year in Maryland. It is always the third Saturday in May. She would complain about the crowds and the inflated prices as compared to other racing days in the year, but she still went.
I don't know how she heard that it was even possible to have ashes scattered at the track. Perhaps she was there one day when someone else was doing it, or she read an announcement in the Racing Form or in the newspaper that someone else had had it done? I'll never know. Anyway, she mentioned it a couple of times throughout the years. At first I did not think she meant it. But one time, when we were having a serious talk about health care proxies and other end of life planning, mom got very specific. She asked for a very simple funeral ("with a plain pine box, like the Pope") and she wanted to be cremated, with the remains scattered at the finish line of the race track. Looking back I think she was just trying to save me money in asking for cremation. I had no idea how expensive it was to buy a burial plot in a private cemetery, and I did not want her resting place to end up being at a Boston city cemetery far away from me.
So after her funeral I bought a beautiful urn and kept her remains on top of a cabinet in my living room. About 2/3 were in the urn and the rest were in a travel box for me to take to the track. It was quite a while after the funeral before I picked up the ashes, because they would not release them to me until I finished paying for the funeral, and I had to wait to get the insurance money to do that.
Right after I picked up the ashes I wrote to the track explaining what a big fan mom had been and asking if it were possible to have her ashes strewn there. I got back a form letter (!) with all the details explaining how it was to be done: only in the morning between the last training workout and the first race, only at the finish line, a track security officer would escort me and my family members from the clubhouse, etc. I never followed up on that first request. I put the form letter in a pile and promptly lost track of it. Every now and then I would look up at the urn and think: "I've got to make arrangements to scatter the ashes" but it was too distressing to think about and I would postpone it once again.
Various friends offered to drive me down for the trip whenever I wanted to go. I kept putting them off. I didn't even want to think about it. Even though knew "she" wasn't in there any more--I didn't want to "lose her". The ashes were all I had left of her physical presence in this world. Ashes are, literally, that which remains.
I contacted the track again by email as mom's 75th birthday approached in 2012. But her birthday was the Saturday before Palm Sunday. Getting that Sunday off work would have been difficult, and I could not get back Saturday night without taking a plane flight (I'm afraid to fly). Truth be told, I probably used those logistical problems as a reason to avoid doing it. I just wasn't ready. Around the same time I was having a health scare of my own that made me revise my own funeral plans. In bold letters on my list of last requests I implored someone to make sure to scatter mom's ashes as she requested. I had surgery that summer that solved the problem, and thank God, and I am here to tell the tale, but it did create a heightened sense of urgency that if something happened to me there would be no one to take care of mom's remains.
When American Pharoah won the Triple Crown, I decided this had to be the year, and the location had to be Pimlico. I did not share many Laurel memories with her, but we both got excited about the Triple Crown.
I wanted her remains to rest at the place where she saw Affirmed win the Preakness and she saw Seattle Slew win the Preakness and she saw the one and only the great Secretariat win the Preakness (and set a track record that still stands).
So I set the date for Sunday, August 2.
After various miscues and miscommunications, I arrived at the Pimlico clubhouse with the ashes in a blue cloth shopping bag. The security guard walked us through the empty paddock to the winner's circle. I stood there for a moment. My mommy in the winner's circle--her rightful place! Then he slid back a metal gate and I walked across the track with my cousin (who was there for moral support). The weather was spectacular--a blue sky with puffy clouds and a soft steady breeze. I performed a very brief ceremony, then spread the remains on the track and raked the track surface over them. I ended with the first verse of a hymn--the hymn I was singing to her at the moment when she died.
I was not feeling mournful. It was a day of holy joy.
Mom loved horse racing, and loved the Preakness, and loved the Triple Crown. She was not on this earth to see American Pharoah's win. But now she is a part of every Preakness that has ever been won and every Preakness that will be run in the future. Her remains rest with many great jockeys and trainers and others who loved horse racing as much as she did.
Since my mom raised me to be a political junkie, I have to acknowledge that "Mission Accomplished" has a different meaning now than it had before Bush 43. So I used that title intentionally. I am aware that what I think is complete may turn out to have a lot more unexpected events to come. But for now there is a big part that is over that deserves to be marked in a special way.
As for the future, what will be will be. The journey out of the grief valley is not over and may never be completely over. But last Sunday I passed through a very important checkpoint, and I have to look waaay back down the road to see the hard and hopeless period I walked through. Time is passing. I am moving on at long last.
Reading back over this diary it seems relatively flat and dry, and that wasn't the way the weekend felt at all! There will be a part II to this diary next week, dealing less with facts and going more into the amazing and wonderful emotional breakthroughs that happened during the trip.
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