Disposition of Remains

by Laura T. Emery

  Saying goodbye to Graziella was equally difficult. It was so unfair that the closest bonds I had forged with people in my life took place so close to my death. Except for Michael. We shared a tainted bond from which I needed to escape.

  I took a taxi to the airport even though Michael had offered me a ride. It was a relief to avoid the drama and the additional burden upon his family.

  I had traveled more in that month than I had in my entire life. I’d left my home only twenty-six days before, but it felt like another lifetime. Misty had tried to teach me to live my life without regret, but I did still regret abandoning Michael for Evan. Just a little bit less than I had originally. Michael may not have forgiven me, but I was on the way to forgiving myself. I had gone to Italy to find Michael and to make my peace with him. Even though I had not found exactly what I’d expected, going to Florence proved to be the best decision I had made in my life so far. I would miss it tremendously.

  I already missed my daily chats with Sister Constance. We had spoken at great length about her love for God, but what I’d found most intriguing was her zest for life. Even though most of her days were spent between the four walls of the Ognissanti, her most cherished things were never far away. She sorted through the Bible’s Commandments and obeyed the ones she felt were most relevant to her. If a nun could be a cafeteria Catholic, I wondered if I could do the same. I was opening up to the fact that every situation and person had a lesson to teach me.

  I regretted not having enough of a backbone to have faced Evan. No matter what he had done to me, I was a coward for scurrying away and hiding. I had shared almost half my life with him; he at least deserved a longer note. At some point I was going to have to make it right, but this was not yet the time.

  I welcomed the alone time that the twelve-hour flight to Africa afforded me. I couldn’t believe that Wilbur had arranged my Lion King fantasy so quickly. I closed my eyes and daydreamed about that magical hour by the blue-green waters with Wilbur; how sublime it was to be so enthralled by another person. I still wished things could have been different between us, but I continued to believe that I had done the right thing by not dragging him into a situation that promised only one sad outcome. Regardless, I couldn’t help reliving that moment and place again and again, lingering in the memory of his supple lips against mine, and the feel of his soft, wavy locks as they fell through my fingers.

  I arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa, just after nine o’clock the following morning. I was a little fuzzy on the details of what I was supposed to do from that point forward and I desperately wanted to find a nice, warm bed and crawl into a fetal position under the covers. I was digging through my bag to find the itinerary that Wilbur had sent to me, when, to my surprise there was a Black man in his fifties holding up a sign reading “Anastasia Uqualla.” I stared in wonderment at the sign. Neither the first, nor the last were names I had used in nearly two decades. I apprehensively approached the smiling man.

  “You must be an associate of Wilbur’s?” I questioned.

  “Yes, I am Victor,” he replied with an odd half curtsy. “I am to take you to Soweto and The Cradle of Humankind.”

  “You can call me Stacia,” I told Victor as he grabbed my backpack.

  “Which animals am I likely to see?” I asked enthusiastically.

  Victor chuckled before answering, “My people have been referred to as a lot of things, but never animals! Soweto is a suburb of Johannesburg, a township comprised of mostly poor people, but rich in history.”

  My exhausted mind went to the dark side. I came to see the animals, but I was apparently taking a detour to see a ghetto. I became increasingly uneasy. I tried to calm my skittish nerves, but it didn’t help that I still had more than $4,000 cash in my backpack and I was setting off with an African stranger. Unfortunately, I was in no position to refuse, being that I was on a continent about which I knew nothing, on trip for which I hadn’t paid a dime. I asked Victor for my backpack, excused myself to the bathroom, and stuffed my money into my minimal cleavage. I dug again through my backpack for the itinerary from Wilbur to no avail. I realized I had fallen asleep on the plane while trying to read it, and there it remained.

  Then it occurred to me, I had mentioned Wilbur to Victor first. This guy might not know Wilbur at all. He could have been sent here by Evan. In my fatigue, irrational thoughts began to take over.

  “How long have you known Wilbur?” I asked, looking discerningly into his eyes for the answer.

  “For years,” Victor replied plainly.

  “Has he brought many women to Africa?” I asked for the dual purpose of confirming that he did in fact know Wilbur, and if he did, to determine if I had been simply a brief member of Wilbur’s harem.

  Victor laughed as if to say, silly American woman.

  “Wilbur is a handsome man, but he always comes alone. You are the first woman he’s brought here. A man that is not married at Wilbur’s age is quite unusual for our culture. I thought he might be a homosexual.”

  “I thought that too!”

  I laughed at my odd bonding topic with Victor.

  While I mulled over Victor’s words, he said, “Our women can be very jealous too.”

  “Oh, no…I’m not…I was just wondering,” I stammered.

  I liked Victor right away and I was becoming too tired to care who he knew. I hopped in his dust-covered Jeep and off we went. Wilbur must have a plan for me; I tried to focus on that. Perhaps Wilbur had given Victor my maiden name on purpose, so I would know it was safe to go with him. Or maybe Wilbur just didn’t want to think of me as being married. I suppose I was just glad he was thinking of me at all.

  Victor was quick to let me know that the crime level in South Africa had been exaggerated in the media, and that it was actually a wonderful place. The more Victor spoke, the more appreciative I was of his company and the more at ease I felt.

  Victor was born and raised in South Africa but had been in self-imposed exile for years, until 1994. That year marked the fall of apartheid, the system of racial segregation imposed in South Africa by the European minority. Victor explained that during apartheid, Blacks received less comprehensive healthcare, were not allowed to go to the “White” beaches, and his family was even forcibly removed from their home in order to separate the races entirely. Black people were deprived of their citizenship. The races were divided into Whites; Blacks; and those of mixed decent which also included Asians and Indians. The last group were labeled as “Coloured.” If the government couldn’t determine your race, you were assigned one by the National Party. Sometimes, families were separated because it was concluded that they were of different races.

  Despite Victor’s trials and tribulations, he expressed his exuberant pride in his country with his lively, cheerful demeanor. He didn’t allude to any underlying sense of animosity toward White people that I could pick up on, although I’m not entirely White, either. I suppose I would have fit into the “Coloured” category. For the first time in my life, I felt some connection with the struggle my people underwent: fighting for their freedom in a land that once belonged solely to them.

  Victor spoke perfect English, the Queen’s English. The British influence was apparent in more than just Victor’s vocabulary. He, along with everyone else, drove on the left side of the road from the right side of the car. Along the way, Victor even gave me options for where I could have “high tea.” The world is obsessed with tea! Victor laughed when I explained that I detested tea. It’s actually an early evening meal, as it turns out.

  We approached a series of enormous, gray stone hands posed in sign language to spell out the word VILAKAZI. Vilakazi Street in Soweto is the only street in the world to have housed two Nobel Peace Prize winners. Victor took me first to the Mandela House—the previous home of Nelson Mandela, now converted into a museum. I was only slightly more familiar with the name Nelson Mandela than I was with the mysterious subject of apartheid.

  Mandela was a lawyer who had become
the key driving force of the anti-apartheid movement. He was arrested and imprisoned for twenty-seven long years, beginning in 1962. His reputation grew while in prison, and after his release he was elected by a multiracial landslide to become the first South African president. I learned that Mandela had spent many nights sleeping on the kitchen floor before his arrest, because it was the only place in the house that bullets could not penetrate.

  I kept looking for wildlife as Victor then showed me the high-walled residence of the second Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a retired Anglican bishop and also a strong opposer of apartheid. He has also campaigned to fight AIDS, poverty, and homophobia. When he is in town, it is said that he walks freely around Vilakazi mingling with the people of the poor community. I was a little embarrassed that I didn’t know more about these men whose lives had made such an impact on the world.

  As we continued down the street, I felt a tinge of guilt as I looked around in the hope that a giraffe would stroll around the corner, or from in between the stacked stone pillars of the building we were approaching. Other than the occasional stray dog, there wasn’t an animal in sight.

  Victor led me to a large, outdoor black-and-white photograph of a young man with a boy dangling from his arms and a grief-stricken girl running alongside them. The caption underneath read, “TO HONOR THE YOUTH WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY.” I had never been politically minded, nor could I have been considered any kind of activist. I’d never had a “cause” other than self-preservation. What was Wilbur trying to teach me with all this? And where were the damn animals?

  “Hector Pieterson was a twelve-year-old who was slain on June 16, 1976,” Victor began.

  He looked for some reaction from me, and when he didn’t get one, he continued.

  “On that day, the people demonstrated against their education being taught exclusively in the Afrikaans language. The National Party wanted all instruction to be taught in their language of Dutch origin rather than in any of the local languages. To peacefully protest, a group of junior high school students began singing one of our traditional songs. Police then arrived, and other protestors became a bit more aggressive. They threw some rocks at the police, and a riot began. The police fired teargas, but before the crowd could disperse, they opened fire and some of the schoolchildren were killed. A photographer caught this image of a schoolmate carrying Hector’s lifeless body with his sister running beside him. That is how Hector became the icon of that day. There were more than five hundred people who died. Now, June 16 is National Youth Day.”

  “You made something good out of something so horrible,” I said, but I felt silly even commenting at all. I felt I had no right to an opinion on such a thing. I lived in a privileged, protected world—a self-imposed prison of regret and self-pity. Even though I had been handed a death sentence, I had still had choices; I still had freedom. I wasn’t being gunned down in the street for singing a song (although someone might have considered it if they had heard me sing). Maybe that was the message Wilbur was trying to make clear to me: that my plight could be turned into something positive.

  The only positive contribution I could think of making was donating my body, or more specifically, my organs—the ones spared from the ravages of cancer. They could incinerate whatever was left, throw me into a box, and sail me on the slow boat to Italy so that Sister Constance could sprinkle my crumbs on top of Botticelli’s grave.

  I’d spent enough time in the hospital morgue to know that our bodies are otherwise worthless after we die. There was, thankfully, only the rare occasion that a newborn wouldn’t make it through the delivery, or was born prematurely and died. Someone’s precious baby was then heaped in together with any other people who were unfortunate enough to expire in our facility. Then there was the urban legend of “Fred,” the morgue resident, about whom no one had cared enough to claim after his death. Rumor has it, after months in our morgue, eventually the county stepped in and tossed him into in a pile of other unwanted bodies as kindling for a giant bonfire.

  While I was still a nursing student I took care of a little elderly lady who requested to have a female caretaker while in the hospital. She was the most modest of women, who nobody wanted to take care of because she was especially needy. For weeks in that rotation I was assigned to her. I would soak her feet, wash her blue wig, and help her apply her clown makeup. She talked endlessly about her life, her kids, and the coupons she’d clipped from the Sunday paper. I walked in one morning to find the nurses throwing a sheet over her head. It was my first lesson in postmortem care. Unfortunately for her, she had died before her family could make funeral arrangements and at the inconvenient time of an overcrowding situation in the morgue. The protocol in such a scenario was to “stack them.” But the only way to fit more than one body in a drawer was to lay them in opposite directions. As a fledgling nurse, I found this horrifying. The dignified, modest, Mrs. Jones ended her days in a sixty-nine position with Fred, or his counterpart, until arrangements were made several days later. I realized then that my body’s final destination would have to be planned with precision.

  I snapped out of my gruesome stream of consciousness on the way to The Cradle of Humankind. We came upon a street littered with souvenir shops with wonderful wooden sculptures.

  “This is the shopping district,” Victor explained. “Would you like to shop for a souvenir?”

  “No place to put a souvenir,” because I’m essentially homeless and I doubt I’ll have room in my urn.

  I had a momentary vision of myself in my coffee can with one of the lovely sculpted giraffes to keep me company.

  “But I could probably use some clothes for the safari. Think you could help me find something safari-like?”

  Victor shrugged, “If that’s what you’d like.”

  He pointed me in the direction of a clothing store and I picked out a red T-shirt.

  “Red is the color of fresh meat to a hungry lion. Other bright colors alert the animals to your presence, making them stay away.”

  I quickly hung the shirt back and grabbed a white one instead.

  “Nice, but it won’t stay white for long. The roads are very dusty. Think earth tones. You want to blend into the environment.”

  I grabbed a camouflage shirt. Finally, I had made the right choice…I thought.

  “You do not want to look like you are part of a rebel force either,” Victor laughed.

  “Okay, so dirt colored it is.”

  Everything Victor said made sense. This wasn’t about fashion; it was about practicality, so I headed over to another rack and selected a couple of drab, tan shirts, and two pairs of loose-fitting, dirt-colored cargo pants. Evan would have been aghast at the whole ensemble. He wanted me never to wear brown because I am brown, and anything that isn’t skin tight “isn’t flattering.” I figured the baggy pants would be more comfortable around my now mushy middle. Gone was my svelte, work-out-five-times-a-week bod. Either I had eaten entirely too much Italian food or I was starting to get a little ascites—a collection of fluid in the abdomen. My mother had the same condition treated several times before she finally died.

  “Don’t worry about buying a lot of clothes,” Victor said as I rummaged through more T-shirts. “Wilbur’s tour provides laundry service.”

  I liked Victor. He smiled no matter what he was saying, although most of what he said while he was smiling implied that I was an idiot. In Africa, I was an idiot—clueless and totally uninformed. I wasn’t just in a different country; I might as well have been in a different galaxy. I knew nothing of where I was.

  The laundry service, I would later learn, consisted of some young African girl running my clothes up and down a Little House on the Prairie-type washboard, then hanging my clothes to dry, which may or may not have worked, depending on the weather.

  We got back into the Jeep, and as he drove, Victor gave me a brief education on the things I was seeing. It was all so fascinating—the history
, the culture, the struggle—that I couldn’t believe it when I was suddenly jolted awake from having inexplicably passed out.

  “It must have been a long flight,” Victor said with a chuckle. “You slept through the African massage!”

  He added a rolling belly laugh for good measure. I later learned that this was a common African joke referring to any bumpy ride.

  I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes as I followed Victor out of the car to some strange building that looked like something out of Land of the Lost. There were still no animals in sight, but I half expected to stumble upon a Sleestack as we entered the stone, moss-covered, mound-shaped building.

  “This is Maropeng Visitor Centre. Maropeng means, ‘returning to the place of origin.’ You are in a forty-seven-thousand-hectare World Heritage Site called The Cradle of Humankind. One third of all the fossils of early man have been discovered in the caves that cover this area—over a thousand hominid species, spanning several million years of evolution. This building represents a tumulus, or a large burial mound.”

  “It’s really interesting,” I said, deciding to hold back on my Land of the Lost reference, though that’s really what the place looked to be.

  It was fascinating. Just inside the tumulus, a staircase descended into an underground museum that featured a boat ride. The attraction was meant to make the rider feel as though he were going back in time to when the Earth was a ball of fiery molten rock emerging from a black hole. I experienced the four elemental forces of nature: earth, wind, fire, and water, then emerged on the other end of the ride back in time to a one-thousand-piece display of the fossils of early man, discovered in South Africa.