Somewhere in America, the Dallas Cowboys are losing a squeaker, and later this same day, the Houston Astros will fall to a walk-off homer, but here, in this spot in America—Death Valley—it's a fine day for that other great Texas product, Millie Hansen.
"It's a done deal," says her daughter, Mary, brushing the last of Millie off of her shorts as she walks toward the minivan that brought her to the Furnace Creek area. Millie's dead, has been since June when she died at 89, and her only child has come here to pour Millie's ashes across the parched crust of the nation's great desert, also the final dusting place of her third and last husband, Bob. They loved camping here, those two, and this is what the old gal wanted.
Here's an important lesson in ash-spreading: Don't wear black. Sometimes the dead just won't let go.
See, she's still with you, Mary is told as she swats at the gray residue on her shorts.
"Until I get to the washing machine," she replies.
There's a weird mix of solemnity and absurdity to this kind of thing. After all: someone died. Someone you loved has been baked down to a plastic bag full of gritty pellets and sand. But you've been processing that grief for months, and maybe her death was a blessing in some way, and so there's just enough emotional wiggle room for that other human trait—impudent humor—to get loose. Because isn't there something deeply comic about the idea of driving several hundred miles to throw a powdered loved one to the wind? Today, in Death Valley—the irony: duly noted—it's hard to know where the line is between meaningful ceremony and kooky adventure. Millie had a sense of humor herself.
Only half of her resides at Furnace Creek. A few minutes earlier, the minivan stopped at the nearby Texas Springs Campground, where the first half was scattered.
"Where's the box o' granny," someone asked.
"They've already got it," one of the great grandchildren said.
After Mary inscribed a memorial note on a Dallas Cowboys pennant—in her 80s, Millie had a Cowboys helmet tattooed on her thigh—the entourage tramped into the barren, folded hills surrounding the mostly unoccupied campground. Mary and her daughter dumped some ashes. "I wish she could've lived to see the Astros in the World Series," Mary sighed. The kids declined the chance to pour from the bag of great grandma: too, um, creepy. They prefer to keep death as an abstraction, or, in the case of the goth-inflected eldest, as a fashion statement, and before long, they were racing each other up the steep dirtscapes, heedless of the calls of their parents ("We didn't bring your insurance cards!") or the weight of the moment. Well, that's kids, you know? Antic life in the shadow of death, and all that.
Millie would've loved the Astros being in the World Series.
Not that, had she hung on, she'd have been able to actually enjoy it. In the last few years of her life, she was blind, mostly deaf and terribly fragile. Her family would have had to shout the scores into her ear, then repeat them, and repeat them again. Imagine such a life: permanently locked into the sensory-deprivation chamber of your own body, smears of light and distant echoes of sound your only input ("IT'S SIX TO SIX, TOP OF THE NINTH, MA! ... SIX TO SIX!"). Who could blame you if you got a little ... cranky? If, when, you finished your soup, you just held the bowl out, expecting someone to take it away? For someone as self-sufficient as you'd always been, camping every chance you got, this utter dependence on others must've been terrible.
With so little information coming in, Millie must've lived mostly amid her memories—perhaps she reflected on the period that she was a war-era B girl in Chicago, one of those women who danced with lonely men for a dime, the bartender watering her drinks so she could stay clear-headed all night; or her stint in a war factory, which ended when her doctor said all that riveting might endanger her unborn child, Mary; or the years she worked as a housekeeper for violinist David Rubinoff; or how she outlived three husbands and four siblings ...
"I don't want to die," she told family members, not long before she did.
And now, here in this vast, sun-cooked bleakness, one life has come down to a handful of narrative fragments and a few pounds of dust, now drifting windblown around Death Valley as Mary walks toward the minivan that holds about half of the people who remember that Millie Hansen ever lived. But at least they do. So it will be for all of us.
Go, Astros.