Warm, clear, and breezy, Friday was very much like THE September 11 of nineteen years ago, and seemed an appropriate day to commemorate the dead. Leslie and I sailed out to Green’s Ledge lighthouse in her little sloop, Reveille, with her sister, Jennifer, our niece, Lindsay Ellis, and an urn containing the partial ashes of Leslie’s best friend, Karen Wessel Marcus. As visitors to this website will recognize, Karen’s death from the Covid19 virus in April was the subject of the first chapter in this journal.

Green’s Ledge light, now an artifact of a bygone era, stands in Long Island Sound, about a mile offshore from the mouth of the Five-Mile River separating Norwalk from Darien, Connecticut. As we headed toward it, Leslie recalled when she had taken this same boat out to sea on September 11, 2001, and watched smoke billowing, like a volcanic eruption, from the twin towers in lower Manhattan. For reasons I no longer recall, I’d decided to stay home on that day, as significant in our history as December 7, 1941 or April 12, 1861.

Arriving at the light, we allowed the Reveille to drift on the tide. Leslie read from Tennyson’s poem, Crossing of the Bar, the last stanza of which reads: “For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place/The flood may bear me far,/ I hope to see my Pilot face to face/When I have crost the bar.” Karen had been an active Episcopalian, so I read next from the Anglican Communion service for burial at sea: “Unto almighty God we commend the soul of our sister departed, and we commit her body to the deep; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in Him shall be changed, and made like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.’

Leslie handed each of us tiny slips of paper, about twenty altogether, upon which she’d written the names of places she and Karen had been together, events they’d experienced, things they had done in their sixty-year friendship. These ranged from the dramatic — climbing Mount Kilimanjaro when they were nineteen — to the mundane —  enjoying lunches at the Fountain Diner in Hartsdale, New York.  The slips fluttered from our fingers overboard, like messages from castaways, and drifted away. Then, Leslie opened the urn and sifted the ashes into the water. Lindsay tossed flowers into the whitish stream and the current carried all away — paper memorials, flowers, ashes. As if one cue, a flight of migrating Monarch butterflies winged over at that moment, some hovering over the flowers, and Jennifer called out: “Well, hello, Karen.”

A fitting farewell, I thought.

Green’s Ledge Light

Flowers drifting with ashes