the one in maine

We drove up the coast and the air was cold, November cold. Acadia came out of nowhere but we didn't stay long. Long enough to stand on boulders and let the wind whip our hair wild. I was wearing my quilted down coat and she her navy pea-coat and we felt the chill through every pore. The Atlantic is not a friendly surf in November. New England is less friendly.

We have just left a funeral for a man we never knew. By proxy, we'd been asked, when it was found out we were going to be driving up the coast. "Go in proxy of me, instead of me." I hadn't worked out the sense of such a thing in my head, but funerals have never seemed to fit into the realm of sense. We go for the family, even if we only knew the deceased. And here, the two of us knew neither the family nor the deceased.

It is a strange thing, a funeral. A perimeter of dark clothed mourners paying their last respects to shell of a person who used to be.

I decide that afternoon, in the cold, on the boulders in Acadia, that when I die I don't want a funeral. I want to live as though I came from dust and I want to return to the earth as dust, spread wide in the Atlantic.

I want to let the wind whip me wild one last time before I finally rest.