Ashes
Last week, my father and I had a short chat about the disposition of my great-uncle Dinu’s ashes. This is a minor point of contention within the family: the ashes were left to my father, but my great-uncle’s papers went to me. (And really, I should write Papers, with a capital-P, as the man thought himself — fairly, even, as I’ll address some other time — someone whose Papers were worthy of cataloguing and saving.) My father has preferred inaction to the possibility of doing something not quite right about said ashes, since 2002 when great-uncle Dinu passed away. He has ideas about laying Dinu to rest by spreading his ashes over the ocean, in La Jolla as it turns out. I asked, why didn’t we do this when I was actually living there, but the answer is murky and probably best left unexplored between us. I was not altogether well, when I was living in the vicinity of La Jolla, let’s say. I couldn’t have cared one iota what we did with Dinu’s ashes at the time, I had bigger problems to solve. He was probably right to wait.
What I find funny at this point in time is that, looking back over the long stretches of time I haven’t thought about Dinu at all, punctuated by the small pockets of time when I did, intensely so, I realize that whether or not I feel well enough in touch with Dinu’s legacy may as well be a function of my own mental health and emotional well-being. The fact that I’m writing about him now is a sign.
What survives of Dinu these twelve years after the reading of his will are his papers and photographs, still tangible and somewhat intact, in boxes in my office closet; his urn in my father’s; his dear friend and secretary, Anastasios, who I believe still inhabits their apartment in Paris and who may yet be a useful source for answers; and, in a very real sense, what remains of Dinu in me.
Discovering the latter has been something of a life-long project, a sort of gift that keeps on giving. He used to write fourteen, fifteen year-old me these long, involved letters in tiny cursive, on tissue-thin airmail paper, filled with detail on a level I’ve never seen anyone else write. He documented everything, from the price of apples at the corner shop, to the dollars and cents a fellow professor owed him for a cup of coffee decades ago. He knew the names of everyone to whom he’d ever been introduced. He shared it all, without filter or thought as to his teenaged reader’s interest — he simply wrote, and hoped some of it would stick. He wrote to live. I didn’t know this about him until long after I’d started doing the same, not really, but in retrospect now I see that he was in fact the first person I ever witnessed doing this. Some of his words were confusing, but none were unwelcome.
He subscribed me to strange mailings, without warning. I read a British Tolkien society fanzine religiously, for years before I ever knew what Lord of the Rings was. I could decipher quite a bit of Elvish before I realized it had to do with elves. It would be decades before I discovered the concept of fandom for my own, and when I did, again, I realized I’d seen its traces before, in things Dinu wrote or sent to me.
I keep hovering around his life story — the life stories of all my recent ancestors, really — cherry-picking little bits here and there, re-using or adapting them for projects of my own. Dinu’s life is the most fertile, still — he traveled widely, and not just as a tourist but to stay, to experience, to live, and so his words are ripe for study — but his siblings had equally interesting stories. I wrote almost an entire NaNoWriMo project last year on the strength of one simple comment I found in one of his notebooks. I stopped only because I reached an impasse of willpower, of sorts. I couldn’t decide if the fictionalized future story of a town whose past I knew well was fair, or if I should back off and write the city’s memoir instead. I still don’t know.
But we should lay him to rest. Regardless of what he’s left behind, he himself deserves to be rid of us.
