A collection and a delivery.
At around 9:00AM a courier came to collect Lara's oxygen machine, which had lived in our house since 11 June 2011, the time she returned from Saint Luc on home-leave after her second chemotherapy. It literally kept her alive at times, especially when her lungs were still in bad shape. The suit-case shaped machine had been mostly on standby since late summer last year as Lara's capacity to breathe indpendently improved. It did travel with us to Honfleur, though, in September. And even since 24 April last, when Lara came home from Saint Luc once again, she used to rely on it when watching movies together on TV or even when sitting outside on the veranda on a sunny afternoon with her friend Liliana. We uncoupled her from the larger machine in the living room, made her walk to the back of the house with her Baxter, and hooked her up to the smaller machine.
The contraption was the single largest piece of medical equipment that had remained in the house since Lara left. Seeing it go felt like yet another step in her deconstruction.
Apart from the collection, this morning's delivery was much more anticipated.
Clad in cut-aways, the parlor attendant presented himself at our apartment at 9:45AM, having announced himself by phone, a half hour before. In his hands was a cylinder-shaped metal cannister measuring 22.5 centimeters in height and 15 in diameter (8.8" and 5.9" respectively). It doesn't really look like an urn to me, which I always associate with a ceramic vase. Appropriately, it is spray-painted ash-color. On the lid of it is a little white sticker with the words 'GABRIEL Lara' and a registration number.
This was she allright. I took the cannister from his hands and he gave me also an official document, i.e. "Permis de transport du corps et des cendres". I would later post the document next to our front door to reassure unsuspecting visitors: Lara's presence in the house was legal.
After the man left, I carried Lara's ashes into the living room, where I had prepared the (non-working) fireplace with a tile (for more stability) and a modest candle arrangement. Standing in front of the fireplace and raising the cannister up high, I caught my own image in the mirror hanging over it, and the floodgates opened once again. Through my tears I placed the ashes on the tile and stepped back and saluted her. Welcome home again, Pluisje, it's been too long.
The scene brought back memories of Sri Lanka. Lara and I had stood twice at the grave of my name-sake, my father's older brother. He died of 'typhoid fever' in Colombo, on the trip home from the East-Indies, in 1939. The two of us had located uncle Toine's grave at Colombo's General Cemetary, in 1991, I being the first family member to have reclaimed it. We came back to it a year later to inspect a small stone I had ordered for it. We stood in front of it then, too, and observed a few moments of silent musing. (See "Tombs" and "Toine" in the previous blog)
It occurred to me how little is left of despouilles once they have been incinerated. In Lara's case, two kilos and 800 grams, a little over six pounds - and that includes the incinerated coffin, lining, shroud, clothes and shoes. You lose, of course, the happy parts of the frame Lara once inhabited. But she'd abandoned it already when she died. Just a body is all that's left. What you burn also, though, is all the unhappy parts of her body, notably the cancer cells, her devastated lungs, her unusable stomach. Igor will never come to visit again. I felt full of revenge and rage all of a sudden towards those parts of Lara which had made her life uncomfortable, miserable, and ultimately unsustainable.
Die cancer die!
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