The Fair Passaic Seeks the Sea
Posted on June 10, 2021 | Leave a comment | Edit
For Donna
My wife Donna was a Jersey girl, from the Vailsburg neighborhood of Newark. We met in 2001, married in ’03, had two children. She died, too young, in January of 2016. Since then, her cremated remains had waited patiently in a plastic bag in a plastic box covered with a cloth in a closet in my house. About five months after her death, I dedicated a small bench to her in a playground park in our Austin neighborhood in a ceremony attended by neighbors and friends, but I’d always intended to have a proper memorial service in New Jersey.
It was never the right time, with one thing or another going on, as the months stretched into years. Then in early 2020 the pandemic hit, and in May of that year Donna’s older sister Andrea, her closest friend and confidante, died virtually at the same time that she’d planned to retire from her decades-long job at a supermarket chain in north central Jersey. Andrea was also one of my best friends — I’d come to regard her as something like a surrogate sister, a source of constant support and good advice — and the loss hit me hard.
Some months after that I decided what I had to do, and planned, organized, and hosted a joint memorial for Donna and Andrea in a place they’d always loved to go, the Jersey Shore (“going down the shore” in the local parlance).
Sometimes people say “so this happened” in Internet-speak to, I don’t know, humblebrag about something they did? It’s annoying, though. I could’ve said “so this happened” in talking about the Celebration of Life/Sea Burial/Long Overdue Dual Memorial Service, but the truth is I organized and planned and hosted the whole thing, it didn’t just happen, I made it happen, glad I did, so there, Internet smartass.
So on Saturday, the fifth of June, I played a Jersey Shore gig. In front of 20 or so of Donna and Andrea’s relatives and old friends, I delivered a eulogy and, together with Andrea’s widower, Ron, scattered their ashes in the wide Atlantic a few miles offshore from the likable shore town of Point Pleasant Beach.
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The previous day, bits and pieces of my 15 years of life with Donna flashed through my mind as the JetBlue A320 winged its way to Newark Liberty International. Donna, I thought, we’re taking you home at last.
There were an abnormal number of travel glitches that day; I can’t remember ever having so many disparate, separate inconveniences of incrementally greater degree. These were, in order:
- Morning bomb threat at the Austin airport which turned out to be nothing, and cleared by the time we arrived, but causing us to depart earlier than planned.
2) The packed flight to EWR was on time and uneventful, but our plane sat on the tarmac for at least 20 minutes waiting for a gate to open up so it could disgorge its tired load.
3) After exiting the plane, we waited in a line for around 15 minutes waiting to leave the secure airport area and go down to the baggage claim, because of an unspecified “incident” as an airport official sort-of-informed me (but not really).
4) The baggage carousel then shut down for 20 to 30 minutes due to some sort of jam. By the time it started up again and we reclaimed our one checked bag, we had already been on the ground a good two hours.
5) Then, the worst of it: Nobody answered when I called our bargain rent-a-car office’s local number, instead routing me to a phone tree from hell that asked me to punch in a number from 1 to 9 based on their offices in various airports, none of which was Newark. When I selected one of the numbers for the heck of it, the call disconnected. Wandering from one level of EWR to another as we might, we found no Ace Rent A Car presence in Newark that evening. Had it closed down without telling us? I’d called the same office only two days before to confirm, and a reassuring staffer’s voice on the other end assured us that everything was in order. It was not.
I finally called an Uber to take us the 55 miles to our shore motel for around $140. The next morning, I called the local Avis office in Point Pleasant Beach to reserve a car. “We have eight reservations and one car,” the Avis guy told me. “It’s first come, first serve. I don’t like the way it’s done, but that’s how this company runs things.”
I immediately took off, walked the 12 minutes or so to the Avis office and happily claimed their sole remaining Corolla, feeling like I’d won the Hunger Games or at least a Nintendo multiplayer video game called Newark Airport, in which the winner is the one who gets to leave the airport first and rent some wheels.
And so this was the way we came, at last, to the Jersey Shore, my family and I. Time to start the not-just-another-beach-vacay.
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Pandemic? What pandemic? To judge by the crowds in the Austin airport, and the mask-free throngs on the hoppin’ Jersey shore, it’s history, baby. Only a few shops still required masks; the beaches, boardwalks and restaurants were packed every day and night.
Scattering the ashes of your late wife three miles off the Jersey coast, nearly five and a half years after her death, can’t help but put you in a ruminative mood. There’s nothing like looking at cremated remains to truly bring it home that your loved one is gone from this earthly plane — I mean, of course I knew that, but now I really, really know that.
I’m extremely glad that my very much alive, sweet and considerate current wife (who, as a widow herself, knows the drill backwards and forwards) is here with me, along with my two teenage sons. People always like to read about horrible things that happen to others, but the not-so-ugly truth is that more good things also happen to the tellers of the horrible tale than they usually like to talk about, and that much of the time the fact that things got better is what makes it bearable to retell the horrible stuff at all. To be honest, my life is now, on balance, pretty good. I feel lucky, and I can honestly say that I’m reasonably at peace with myself and happier than I’ve ever been. I know it’s a temporary state, like anything, but I can live with that and I’ve learned to appreciate the here and now.
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After the guests had boarded the Queen Mary, a sturdy 85-foot double-decker usually used for fishing trips, and we were heading out, at the suggestion of a boathand that this relatively quiet period might be a good time for a speech, I grabbed a mic and set into the eulogy I’d written, revised and revised again and again and again. I came around to the climax with these phrases:
Donna’s journey on earth may be over, but her legacy lives on; and if you knew her, you don’t need me to tell you more. You already know. In certain ways, Donna is still here.
In the going out and in the coming in, in the rising of the wind and the flow of the ocean, and in all our hopes and dreams for a better world.
Just as I was saying “the flow of the ocean,” a big swell hit the boat and everyone laughed, as if some special forces were at play. Perhaps Donna and Andrea were throwing spectral elbows at each other.
The mood on the boat was far from sackcloth and lamentations. As I looked at the guests chatting with each other, glad for this opportunity to reconnect, my thoughts were that Donna and Andrea would just be really happy to see their old friends and relatives getting together to pay tribute to them, and to catch up, without masks, with each other and with life. It was about time.
As parting gifts, I distributed CDs with a playlist I’d made in tribute to Donna. One of my selections, “Song of the Passaic,” has lyrics by John Alleyne Macnab, a New Jersey-based poet who wrote them in 1890 and died in 1915, and were set to music by Fountains of Wayne about 95 years after his death, to great effect. The Passaic River runs for about 80 miles through northern Jersey, including Newark, so I thought it was quite an appropriate selection for the playlist.
The rivers run and none shall know
How long their waters yet may flow
We read the record of the past
While time withholds the future cast
Yet in their flowing to the sea
The rivers fill their destiny
And to the measure of their lays
Run on and on through endless days
And in the rise
The light and glow
Of grand old rivers in their flow
From distant hills through dales and lea
The fair Passaic seeks the sea
The fair Passaic seeks the sea
And overhead in arch of stone
There flows a tide so slow and prone
To will of men whose genius planned
A waterway that runs through land
Until its slow and lazy tide
O’erflows its banks on either side
And vast expanse of wasteland fills
With ooze of water at its wilt
And in the rise
The light and glow
Of grand old rivers in their flow
From distant hills through dales and lea
The fair Passaic seeks the sea
The fair Passaic seeks the sea
That evening I sat with my son at the Squan Tavern, eating their famed pizza, imagining the spirits of Donna and Andrea watching us. I lifted my glass of water in silent salute as I looked over my shoulder.
The sound system at the pub then played “Over the Rainbow,” sung by Eva Cassidy, who, by the way, blows Judy Garland out of the water (this Donna and I agreed on), which is also the last song on the playlist I burned for the event. Coincidence? I think not.
Donna is gone from this earth, and Andrea, and their parents Ken and Lorraine, who I also knew, and my mom, since 1990. My dad is still around at 91 and in good health, but I suppose I’m verging on elder-of-the-tribe status myself at this point in that I’m old enough to remember people and events that a lot of adults now don’t.
Donna missed a lot of stuff. Bad stuff, like the Trump horror and COVID, and Andrea’s death (ah, but they’re together again now!). Also a lot of good stuff, like her sons’ graduation from elementary school and middle school and their both becoming admirable 16-year-olds in vastly different ways.
The waves off the Atlantic coast remain, unchanging, indefinable, eternal.
We remain, for the moment, trying to make sense of it all.
The person I am now was forged in loss and chaos, and finally by love, redemption, and acceptance. If you’re looking for a narrative arc to my life, that’s it. Perhaps it’s yours, too.
Ron and I waved our late wives’ ashes out over the wide Atlantic. We could see the ashes spread out on the surface of the waves for a few moments, before silently disappearing from view.
Godspeed, Donna and Andrea. You’re home. You’re free.
Ah, Donna.
Ah, Andrea.
Ah, music.
Ah, life.
And the fair Passaic, it seeks the sea.
