Lei

The summer after my mother died, we went to Nantucket, like we did every summer. We took along my father, tentative with loss like the rest of us. It made sense. Nantucket was common ground, and had been their every summer, too.     

I’d brought the double tuberose lei that my mother’s brother John and wife Hattie sent from Kaua’i when they learned of her passing. I had stored it in our basement refrigerator for two months, intending to symbolically toss it into Nantucket Sound with my father. We’d be on the top deck of the ferry as it rounded Brant Point Light, and I brought myself to tears imagining the toss, the gentle trajectory, the brave buoyancy before vanishing. It would be solemn. Fitting.

As the lighthouse came into view, Dad and I went to the railing, lei drooping between us. The creamy blossoms had just begun to turn brown. Together, we tossed it.

To my horror, the moving ferry and brisk headwind bounced the lei back against the side of the ferry. It slid to a sloppy rest atop the ferry’s projecting rubber bumper, pretty much the shocking polar opposite of what I had in mind.  

The next day, everyone went to the beach except me. I woke up feeling dizzy, the world slanting every time I tried to stand. When I lay on my bed and shut my eyes, I felt like I was floating on a raft. Me being me, I spent my alone time replaying the humiliating lei toss, a rebuke on loop. Dad and I should have counted down and coordinated our throw from the less windy side of the boat. And speaking of regrets, I should never have urged my mother that dark day in April to go to the emergency room of the hospital she’d end up dying in a few weeks later. A litany of missteps, culminating in a botched lei toss.

I was ruminating when a sudden breeze wafted over me, fragrant with salt air and boxwood, familiar and comforting as my mother’s soft voice. It brought into focus love as flow, not totem or place marker. And then, from my bed-raft, I let the lei go.