All of This by Rebecca Woolf

Author:Rebecca Woolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Coastlines

I knew from the beginning that we wouldn’t bury all of him.

As much as the kids needed a place to visit, we also needed to release him into the wild. Most people put the ashes of their loved ones somewhere with significance—a place that held great meaning to the deceased—but Hal never talked about the places he loved, only the ones he wanted to see next.

Nostalgia didn’t interest him. The future was far more attractive to him than the past and he spoke of tomorrow with the same wistfulness I reserved for yesterdays. What a strange paradox: the remains of a man who loved a future he would never experience in the hands of a wife incapable of making plans.

In one of my earliest text exchanges with Hal, he spoke of one day moving us to the Pacific Northwest. He told me he dreamt of living there. In a house overlooking the sea, where the fog was thick and the ocean was too cold to swim in. We talked about vacationing there as a family on multiple occasions but never actually took the trip. For as long as I’d known Hal, he’d dreamt of the Oregon coast. Now, for as long as there was an Oregon coast, it would dream about him back.

* * *

After Hal died, the kids came to me separately and asked if he had left them anything. I had been afraid this would happen but had hoped it was merely projection—that maybe I had seen one too many Super Bowl ads depicting dying dads and their prerecorded birthday messages for their surviving children.

Happy sixteenth birthday, son. Here’s a tire-changing tutorial video I filmed for you while I was dying of cancer. I’m sorry I can’t be there to teach you with my own two oil-stained hands, son, but would ya do yer old man a favor? Would ya tell yer mom I love her and ask for the keys to the Chevrolet? That’s right, boy. Now that you’re sixteen, the El Dorado is yours. I want you to drive her with the same pride I did. Into the sunset, son. That’s right. Make me proud.

Annnnnd fade to black. Chevy Runs Deep.

But it wasn’t just me who was hoping Hal would leave something for his children. Friends had come to me from the beginning, volunteering their camera equipment and production services to record messages for the kids to watch someday.

Hal couldn’t do it and he didn’t have to and I understood. Sort of. I understand more now, with some distance. I have let go of what I felt could have been a better death, accepting the complications that come with such mortal procedures. And while Archer took matters into his own hands when it came to the closure he had with his father, the girls were unable to ever really say goodbye—something I knew I would need to be proactive in helping them work through. The burial and funeral were important first steps, but I felt it was just as necessary for us to take a trip to a place that was equally unfamiliar to all of us.

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