Peace, Ease & Catharsis

Amaryllis drove her red Toyota Tercel down the gravel lane towards the Northport beach parking lot. It was a mild Fool’s Spring day in March, the kind of day that offered the promise of brighter days ahead with sunshine and a light cool breeze, enough to start to melt the snow, but still too soon to consider changing over from winter tires to all-seasons. Bluenosers might well welcome the warmer temperatures of a day like this, but they knew better than to make any hard and fast plans about planting gardens or storing snow blowers just yet. Amaryllis was no exception, but seeing the bright blue sky and smelling spring on the air, she had decided that morning to seize the day.

Not surprisingly, as she parked her car and turned off the engine, hers was the sole vehicle there.

For the occasion, she’d worn a loose-fitting off-white capped-sleeve dress. Temperate though the conditions might be for this time of year, she was glad she’d also brought along her heavy sweater. Sure, it clashed with the fancy dress, but somehow it seemed all the more fitting for the task that lay ahead of her - providing an aura of ceremony cloaked in practicality.

She reached over to her right to unbuckle the pewter urn from the passenger seat. It hadn’t felt right to simply stow it away in the trunk or on the floor in the back seat. Instead, she’d offered his cremains one final reluctant trip down Route 366 where he could metaphorically take in the view.

The time had come to say goodbye once and for all, to make peace with the past, to begin anew.

Opening the car door with her left hand and cradling the ossuary in the crook of her right arm, she exited the Tercel. Closing the door with no imminent urge to ensure that it was locked, she made her way past the change rooms and the outhouses, beyond the picnic tables and sun shelters, to the cape overlooking the shore. She’d considered heading down the slope to the water’s edge, but noticing that the tide was in, she determined it would be safer to stay on higher ground. The sun may have been warm, but the salt air breeze was brisk and her curly golden brown shoulder-length hair kept grazing her face. Looking north-easterly towards Victoria, Prince Edward Island across the Northumberland Strait, she took a deep breath and resolved that it would be best to just get on with it.

Amaryllis removed the lid from the urn and dropped it on the damp terrain beneath her feet. She reached into the vessel and grabbed a handful of ashes, holding them out in front of her before releasing them into the wind and over the cape onto the beach below.

“I forgive you for what you did to me,” she declared. “But I forgive you for my sake, not for yours.”

She reached into the urn once more, grabbing another handful of its contents and repeated the same sequence, this time saying “I forgive you for what you did to all of us, but I forgive you to set their spirits free.”

Once more, she gathered and set free the cremains, proclaiming “I forgive you for who and what you were, but I refuse to allow it to define me. You will have no power over me.”

Finally, she overturned the urn and emptied what was left of the cremains to the open air of the embankment. She picked up the lid from the ground and placed it back atop the now-uninhabited pewter canister. She turned back towards the parking lot and practically skipped as she walked, dropping the urn in the trash can along the way, almost as a second thought. There was no need to take it home with her.

She got back into her car, started the engine, and gazed once more across the water. She felt lighter, neither angry nor sad. Rather, a sense of calm and peace slowly permeated her being.

As she turned the car around to head back out the lane towards the secondary highway to make her journey home, she cranked up the radio. Some other artist’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” blared.

“Fitting,” she chuckled as she turned to the right and veered west to follow the sun.