Baja, Mexico, April 2004
In Memory of Graham Edward Woody
When Graham died, I could think of no place that felt right for his ashes. Then, five years later, Ann Ortiz called to chat with her old friend Sid. He held the phone for me to hear, too. She was telling him the story of how she had been surprised to learn that Graham had gone surfing at the beach just north of their home in Punta Cabras. So, on the next Easter holiday, Frank and Ann Ortiz hosted Roger and Gloria Woody, Sid Finkelstein and me at their home in Punta Cabras. This narrative comes with gratitude for Frank and Ann, for our families, for all who taught and cared for Graham, and for his beloved Synanon brothers and sisters. Barbara Finkelstein
If the cove were open arms, Frank and Ann’s place would be the heart,
and beyond the village at left fingertips, Pablo’s finca
and a row of dead palm trees planted by Ajido Erendira to claim the
property for themselves.
“The beginning of a development,” they had planned to argue in court,
but one night while everyone in the village was asleep,
buckets of salt water carried themselves up the cliff, withered those trees,
nourished the Ajido’s failure, and established Pablo’s inheritance.
Where the right hand might touch, rocks tumble like gemstones in rough
water,
and just beyond the reach of fingers, waves roll out of surfer dreams
and ride swiftly to shore.
Before Frank and Ann found their place—a fishing shack that suited them
until they wanted to share their discovery and Frank’s cooking,
Graham had come here to surf.
So, when he bounced his silver-blue truck over ruts and flung dust through
the village,
when he shifted gears just beyond the neighbors, Larry’s and Wanda’s
house,
he might not have noticed the shack on the point of lava rock for which
the village is named.
But were he to come through now, he would see Casa Ortiz,
a three-story stucco house following the shape of the hill,
and he would join us on the deck.
We would call Larry and Wanda to come for tequilas and conversation.
We would be here for a different reason.
Now, we are father, stepmother, two friends, stepfather, and mother,
and although the person we long for does not appear,
two whales move in from horizon. They surface and spout.
A seal bobs in the waves below us,
and just as Sid says, “Now to complete the trilogy, we need a dolphin!”
three dolphins glide through a drift of foam escorting their silver-gray
child.
Another dolphin swims into the cove. He catches a wave and surfs past us,
his sleek, long body glistening.
The deck floor shakes with our jumping and shouting.
Five years of waiting—we have chosen the right place.
But is there ever a right place for the ashes of your child’s body?
We climb down to wet rocks, to little pools, anemones, singing muscle
shells, shadows of gulls’ wings, and want it to be so,
but pobre norteamericanos, have you no place of your own?
What right have we to bring our grief to what already burdens this village?
And on our way here as we passed white crosses scrubbed for Easter,
new flowers wrapping their arms, we understood their messages.
Don’t let your boy drive too fast around this curve!
Watch for the loose edges of cliff!
And what about the young village parents whose child died in its crib?
Can a white cross warn them when another child is born?
Gloria moves to my side. Stepmother, second mother, she too has lost
a son, her thoughtful, kind, and talented Brian.
She whispers that by grieving my son, she grieves hers.
And Frank says, “Now it won’t just be Annie and me. There will be three
of us.”
Graham had touched us with his passion for life.
He schooled himself in ocean,
hovered once beneath water’s surface off Belize,
meeting an old dolphin eye to eye,
longing, he said, for a transmission of wisdom.
And he probed fear—not to dare it, but to move through it:
in bat caves where it streamed in darkness,
on the Indian Ocean where its potential is all one sees,
in the Sierre Nevada Mountains where it condenses and floats as clouds,
in coma, where it takes all one’s strength to surface briefly and to lift
one’s head.
Roger and I remind one another of the baby who hadn’t yet learned to
crawl but scooted through sand squealing to touch Pacific Ocean waves.
We stand together on the edge of rock, close to water’s wild swirl:
we say our words and blessings, small sounds in the ocean’s magnitude.
When ashes meet the spray of crashing waves, they disappear as mist,
when fragments of bone leave one’s hand, they drop like shells.
Traces cling to one’s skin, catch beneath fingernails.
At his birth, I had lifted him out, palms beneath his tiny shoulders,
fingers grasping his not yet breathing self.
I had marveled at the perfect circle, how my body connected with his,
how in the photo Roger took the next day placental blood still showed
from beneath my fingernails.
Now, we linger on the rocks,
the bits of bone we have just relinquished were once of ourselves.
How can we let them go?
The ocean answers with hours of gray calm.
Night brings a waning moon and stars.
The next day, dolphins diving and playing;
more whales spy-hopping, slapping the water belly-flat.
Ann takes me to hunt for jade stones and hidden crystals.
That evening we light a fire, tell our stories.
Another morning: finches and warblers busy in sage and mesquite.
Another question: how do we give back to our friends?
We parents tried—one pasta meal, two doors repaired, and a pot of soup.
And as weekend visitors left trash in the cove, we might clean up there.
Sid and I go out early.
Larry and Wanda already have cartons burning in a barrel by their house,
and out on the headlands they are tending a second fire.
We join them, our trash bags empty.
Larry reaches into the pocket of his shirt.
“Look what I found,” he says.
“It’s the vertebra from the sacrum of a dolphin—or maybe even a baby
whale.”
It is clean and whole, this bone of an ocean child.
He places it in my hand as gift.
Pobre norteamericanos, we stand in the cove’s embrace.
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