The Nana Tree

I hold my grandma’s ashes in my hand, in a green urn with gold etching that stands about three inches tall.  I turn it upside down. Handcrafted in India, it says, and under that, Source.

I didn’t know I was going to run with my Grandma’s ashes today. 

I only knew I had to run because it’s been since September that I’ve visited the graveyard and today I feel a little crazy in the head and I don’t know how to break the crazy spell except through movement.  I can’t stomach the idea of going to a yoga studio yet. I need the wind and the wild and the graveyard and my own sad company.   

 I am running very slowly but I am making myself run.  I wanted to run in the alleys between the houses so people couldn’t see me but the alleys are still too full of snow and ice.  So I run down the bike lane on the main street in Old Town, facing oncoming traffic and wearing sunglasses that hide half my face.  I am wearing my Prana pants that I bought at a La Jolla Goodwill a few years ago, on the once a year getaway my partner and I take every October, to remind ourselves that we can still be lovers.  My pants are sagging while I run. This is not because I have lost weight. Sadness has not sabotaged my appetite. Food is one of the only pleasures and only variables to break up the days, other than unexpected symptoms from Phoenix’s body, and I crave sensation, any sensation other than grief.  My pants are sagging because they are made for yoga, not running. 

But I forgot.

Because I haven’t done this for months.  

 These ashes do not belong to my Grandma who died on October 2nd, a few weeks after Phoenix’s diagnosis.  These ashes belong to my mother’s mother who died in February 2011. I moved Nana’s urn with us from Virginia to Colorado and have continued to move it around my house, not sure where she needed to live.  For years, she spent time between the pages of a vintage copy of Jane Eyre that I displayed upright on a bookshelf because the cover illustration looked like liberated women and I thought Nana would like to live among the liberated women.  

Just this morning, I moved Nana from a windowsill back to the bookshelf because I opened an early Christmas present (from myself to myself) of a coffee table book about design and decided to keep the disposable cover art as something I could write a note on later and mail to a friend.  Thinking about repurposed stationery led me to collect random pieces of paper from all over my house.  

This is a very Nana thing to do. 

I come from a long line of scrap savers. 

My great-grandmother decoupaged her food storage tins. 

Nana had drawers filled with buttons and fabric and stuff for “piddlin.” 

My mom has basement shelves filled with scrapbooking and art supplies, each bin labeled with a label maker; a slice of crafting heaven.  

I walked around holding the collected paper trying to come up with a beautiful box to put it all in. Which led me to my bookshelf and an old tin box (our yard sale money box from when I was a kid) that I use as a bookend.  I opened the box and found a collection of geodes and rocks, so I decided to line the windowsills of my writing room with the rocks, freeing the box, and giving the stationery a home. All of which led me to move Nana’s urn from the windowsill back to the bookshelf.  

Then I went into the bathroom to put my hair in a ponytail and took my phone with me to cue up the book I’ve been listening to on Audible and as I pressed play, the author was talking about spreading her husband’s ashes, licking them from her fingers so that he could always be inside her.  

And there it was.  

The knowing that I needed to take Nana’s ashes and run with them in my hand to the graveyard and spread them under my favorite tree.  

I don’t even fully know why I need to do this on today, the last solstice of the decade, until I’m halfway to the graveyard, dictating thoughts into the Notes section of my phone and I say, “Phoenix, you were conceived on the night of Nana’s funeral.  It’s time for me to bury her ashes so that you can be born again.”  

I start crying and choke on the words. 

Of course, that’s what I’m doing.

Of course, I’m hoping the ashes scattered will become Phoenix rising. 

Of course, this is why I’ve held on to this little three-inch urn for almost nine years.

Of course, this is why I got a wild hair today to collect stationery and empty a box of rocks, like a scavenger hunt leading me to Nana. 

Of course, this is why the book I’ve been listening to on and off for six hours happens to be cued to the exact place where she talks about her husband’s ashes.  

Of course, on this, the darkest night when the sun stands still, I have to make a holy gesture of hope.      

The urn fits in the palm of my hand like a tiny grenade. I run all three miles holding it tight, the ashes shaking up and down like, well, like a shaker.  Like I’m that one band member with the great voice who can’t play an instrument to save her life so she works the hell out of the little plastic egg. 

I enter the graveyard.

The birds always sing louder here. There are so many poinsettias.  I do not like poinsettias. Especially when they have glitter on them. Who feels the need to bedazzle a flower?  Nana always had poinsettias at Christmas wrapped in shiny green foil. It smells like someone is starting a fire. The pavement turns to the moist, beaten down gravel roads of my youth. This is my favorite thing about gravel roads. I love when the gravel stops trying to be rocks and just lets itself settle into soft, held together earth.  

I lope to my tree and stop. 

My throat tastes sweet and painful from the cold air, aching in the pockets behind my teeth.  I unscrew the lid of the urn and try to reach in to grab the plastic bag of ashes but my fingers are too big. For a minute, I think how ironic that my dramatic gesture will be foiled by stubby fingers that can’t pinch.  But then I take a stick and pry the bag up and I’m ready to dump the ashes into the roots.

The bag breaks as I pull it out and ashes scatter all over the sleeves of my black running shirt. 

I lick my fingers so that Nana will be inside of me even though she already is. Then I sprinkle the ashes into the roots of the cottonwood and pat them into a tiny crevice at the base of the trunk where the fairies live.  

I say, “Thank you, Nana, for bringing me Phoenix.  Please let your ashes bring him life. Every time I visit this tree, it will now be my Nana tree.”  

I can tell the tree already knew it was the Nana tree. 

It was gently waiting for me to catch up, like trees do.

I take pictures of the ashes and the tree and the roots and my hand holding one particularly big piece of ash, like a chip of bone.  I gather twigs and lean them against the trunk making a fence to protect the ashes, except when I back away and look at it, it looks like a vulva, like the Nana tree is birthing. I marvel at the weirdness of life. 

That this is my life. 

I don’t really care if what I do makes sense anymore because nothing really makes sense anymore. 

Except it does. 

I put the little empty urn in my pocket and run home.