Burial at Sea, J. W. Carmichael, 1855.
The Illustrated London News, August 4, 1855.
Ryan Jackson knew just what he wanted when his time came. Old-fashioned burial at sea was his plan; his casket would be ceremoniously jettisoned off the side of a ship and into the deep. Ryan loved the water. He was a Vietnam vet—a marine. Before then, as an adolescent, he had been one of Busch Gardens’ first barefoot water skiers, among the youngest the park had ever had. When Ryan died of a heart attack, his widow, Chris, investigated conventional sea burial. Among other rules and stipulations, she discovered the following, from the Federal EPA’S Title 40, Volume 17:
Burial at sea of human remains which are not cremated shall take place no closer than 3 nautical miles from land and in water no less than one hundred fathoms (six hundred feet) from (i) 27°30′00″ to 31°00′00″ North Latitude off St. Augustine and Cape Canaveral, Florida; (ii) 82°20′00″ to 84°00′00″ West Longitude off Dry Tortugas, Florida; and (iii) 87°15′00″ to 89°50′00″ West Longitude off the Mississippi River Delta, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Florida. All necessary measures shall be taken to ensure that the remains sink to the bottom rapidly and permanently.
It was all a mite more complex than she had anticipated, and so when a little more Internet research turned up the site for Eternal Reefs, their offerings struck Chris as the next-best option.
Eternal Reefs is a company that mixes the cremated ashes of your loved one with a cement compound to create part of an artificial coral reef. The company encourages survivors to participate in the creation of the artificial “reef balls” and to oversee their final deliverance into the ocean—the modern-day version of burial-at-sea—at one of several dedicated offshore reef beds.
Year by year, more and more people are scattering or burying cremated remains in places of natural beauty. A couple of decades ago, the National Park Service, recognizing an unstoppable phenomenon when they saw it, came up with a system of permits and guidelines for people who wanted to scatter ashes. Among the requirements on the Grand Canyon’s application: “No teeth, bone fragments, or remnants recognizable as human remains may be scattered.” At Yosemite, “cremains must be spread over an area large enough that no single portion is accumulated in one place.” Last year, Rocky Mountain National Park fielded 78 such requests (that’s up from 25 five years before), and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee, 106. And this doesn’t begin to count the people who scatter first and ask questions later.
This country has seen its cremations more than triple in the past thirty years. To a people increasingly turned off by burial—whether it’s due to an aversion to the body’s natural decomposition process or to the time, effort, and planning that burial requires—scattering in places of natural grandeur offers the same sense of reunion with the earth. What higher tribute is there, after all, than to infuse a place of natural, indisputable majesty with someone’s remnants forever? What higher praise than to endow someone’s very identity with the power and beauty of that place? The red walls of the Grand Canyon become your grandmother. The ocean, your husband.
I’m not sure what mood to expect at one of Eternal Reefs’ two-day reef-ball-deployment events. I’m hazarding: a funeral service with reefs? But when I shake George Frankel’s hand at Friday’s reef-ball viewing—he’s a hardy man with a rough-hewn sort of Brothers-Grimms-ish countenance—he pulls a lopsided grin at my outfit. “Ah, dressed carefully. Very conservative, very good,” he jokes, and he’s right. I chose a gray nondescript top, black pants, and pearl earrings this morning. Now I’m standing in a wide, fishy-smelling alleyway. The six mourning families who are congregating wear vivid sundresses, shorts, and T-shirts as they chat away brightly over bottled water and sodas. George Frankel and Don Brawley—Eternal Reefs’ CEO and founder, respectively—wear khaki shorts and tidy logoed polo shirts, sea blue. The spirit here is not at all funereal, despite the preponderance of dark sunglasses on this overcast, muggy morning. Instead, far-flung family members greet one other with the warmth of long-awaited reunions. Small children abound, as does purse rummaging for baggies of Cheerios, juice boxes, and toys.
There is a tamped-down sense of thrill in the air, the sort brought on by novelty. The hulking objects of this fascination sit crouched in a neat line on the other side of the small lot. To visualize the artificial coral reef balls, picture circular footrests made from gray cement. Now picture those footrests shaped like hollow bells: round on top, flat on the bottom. Two to four feet tall, and just as wide. Their surfaces are peppered, Swiss-cheese-like, with holes and remind me in appearance of nothing so much as the trick-or-treater in the Charlie Brown Halloween Special who dressed as a ghost but cut four or five too many eyeholes in his sheet.
Tomorrow, these families will take a chartered fishing boat out on the Atlantic and watch as the reef balls are placed at sea. There, as part of an artificial reef, they will help support a vital and endangered ecosystem. Tomorrow we’ll be careening across turquoise water, the wind whipping our hair. For today’s viewing, though, we’re standing in a featureless alleyway off Shem Creek, the major waterway to the ocean from Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. The sandy lot smells slightly of brine and is sandwiched between two boat storage units: a squat shed and a tower of metal girders stretching two stories into the sky.
Soon, the families are mingling around the reef balls, which are more or less identical in appearance but contain the ashes of people who were, in life, complete strangers: fathers, husbands, grandfathers, and in one case, a cat named Mistofeles. Wives and sons and daughters snap pictures and reach out with tentative affection to stroke the reef balls as they murmur over the pretty bronze plaques pressed into each.
The flat brass plaques are engraved with the deceased’s name and dates. The whole package really makes me think of headstones, and I have to remind myself that they’re much more than that: these objects are the deceased. In a way, these survivors are interacting directly with the bodies of the people they loved in life, although most probably prefer not to think about it that way. Funeral director Don Wilkerson’s comment flurries through my mind: Have you ever heard anyone say, “I can’t believe that Joan is dead”? Well, maybe they didn’t go to the funeral, but seeing is believing. I wonder how much this physical contact also results in a kind of “believing,” a tangible step in the long process of what people today call “closure.”
(Later this same year, Eternal Reefs will change their design, so that rather than being spread through the entire reef ball, the cremains will be concentrated in one teardrop-shaped cement “pearl” in the center. The change expedites the entire reef-ball-crafting process, so that families who come together for the deployment can also be present for its creation earlier the same weekend, rather than having to shell out money to travel to two separate events. When I first hear this, I’m a little disappointed at the loss of direct interaction between mourners and the deceased: Looked at one way, the post-2007 memorial reefs are mostly just monuments to the dead, rather than transformed versions of them. On the other hand, more family members now get to interact with the ashes: pouring them into the mold for the pearl and decorating a new cement ring around the reef ball with handprints, for example.)
A woman here today from Georgia tells me that she counts among her life’s worst memories the funerals she remembers from her Italian American childhood. “Corpses in the house, and everybody screamed and yelled and carried on, and at age five or six or seven, that makes you fearful. And the corpse was in the house; can you imagine that?” The mood here is comparatively sedate. No corpses in anyone’s living quarters, nor, as someone else here puts it, “the ashes on your mantle that you have to feel creepy about.” These families have come here to usher their loved ones, quite literally, away.
Beyond the small plaques affixed to each, the families have personalized their reef balls in other ways. Ryan Jackson’s daughter tells me that while his was still a wet cement and ash mixture, her mother had mixed into it the following: locks of hair from his grown children, several of his military ribbons, a Green Bay Packers’ Cheesehead charm, a small Egyptian ankh he’d made (he was a jeweler), and a tiny pair of ruby red slippers “because there’s no place like home, and to her, my dad was home.” Most of these cement balls also sport, carved into the surface, the initials of grandchildren, brothers, and wives.
Eternal Reefs’ founder Don Brawley is, at heart and in background, not a funeral man, but “a reef-baller from way back.” He’s most interested in undersea ecosystem preservation; this interest started in college, when he and some diving buddies noticed that pollution, human contact, and temperature disturbance were causing some of their favorite reefs in the Florida Keys to look as if they suffered from massive cases of tooth decay. Don has dedicated much of his life to developing the reef ball, this object made of cement and special additives, on which real coral will grow and thrive. Like many driven people, he’s happiest when attending to the activities most closely related to his passion: actually making the reef balls, or talking about the new plant and animal life he saw flourishing around a particular reef on a recent dive.
Don’s demeanor is quiet and unflappable. I wouldn’t call him a people person—he’s not one of those gregarious beings to whom others flock naturally—but he is good at calming family members of the deceased and at making them feel useful. Today, I see him collect several people who seem at loose ends and put them to work. He charges them with making sure their family members sign in when they arrive or has them distribute crayons and paper to children so that they can create rubbings of the bronze plaques. They are small tasks, but people take them up eagerly.
Grief itself might be physically intangible, but people like having activities that create a tangible something out of this abstract emotion—especially activities that make us feel like we’re helping shepherd life away from life. Even small tasks, like giving out crayons. “One of the key things that we do,” says Don, “that I don’t think anybody else in this industry does, is we get the families involved.” He’s talking about the funeral industry—not the industry of turning people and pets into coral reef balls. His is the only company in that particular industry. (Two companies come close: Great Burial Reef creates hollow artificial reefs that you can pour your loved ones’ ashes into and seal shut at home. And the Neptune Society has established an underwater reef “city” off the coast of Miami in 2009. Planned eventually to span sixteen acres, this “classical re-creation of the Lost City, 40 feet under the sea,” resembles the crumbling Atlantis of a 1950s pulp novel cover, complete with “bronze statues of lions, majestic columns and sculptures of shells and starfish.” Cremains are placed in cement molds of “decorative features” shaped like starfish or shells.)
We homo sapiens like the idea of somehow endowing one’s temporary stay on this earth with permanence in death, even if that permanence means a resting place where the living person couldn’t have survived for five minutes in life, a place ten miles out to sea and fifty feet below it. A lot of people here tell me their loved ones were scuba divers or sailors who felt more at home by the ocean. One woman tells me her husband didn’t want to be in a cemetery at the top of some lonely hill. “At least he’ll have fish visiting,” she says. And when the artificial reef does deteriorate, “his plaque will fall down to the ocean floor and the sun will shine on it.”
Many of these families held traditional memorial services months ago. This weekend holds a slightly different meaning for them. Call it Memorial, Part II. This is one of the advantages cremation has over traditional burial; it gives survivors the benefit of time. When grief’s first sharp horror has dulled some, it’s easier to think creatively enough to figure out the ideal memorial.
“Ed, Dad, Poo,” reads the plaque on the reef ball that’s garnering the most photos at the moment, that last word being a typo. So says Jennifer Dolan, the thirty-something daughter of Edward Dolan, who died last fall of colon cancer. “Yeah, they left off the ‘h.’ ‘Pooh’ is what the children called him.”
I swear there are at least eight or nine children swarming in a beelike blur around this reef ball, although actual fact places the real number at five. Jennifer is personally responsible for four of the kids: two sets of twins who inhabit that golden age just beyond toddler-hood. They’ve been making colorful crayon rubbings of their grandfather’s plaque, and now they’re in the process of really discovering the reef ball in terms of its full potential as a jungle gym. Its many small holes serve as wonderful cave openings in which to pour sand, and, as they’re now finding out, even better footholds. It’s official: The artificial reef ball bests the funeral urn when it comes to real entertainment value. Jennifer Dolan and her sisters clasp hands over their mouths and look around in ambivalent delight as the children clamber all over their grandfather’s reef ball, just as they used to do with the man himself when he was alive.
A few minutes later, it is really hot and thick, and George Frankel walks to the center of the lot and announces that it’s time for the military honors. Eternal Reefs staff will arrange and host the honors if any of the deceased merit the ceremony; there are four this weekend. And it’s interesting: Even though the boats that deploy the reef balls don’t set sail till tomorrow, all the families—even those whose dead were not veterans—have turned out for today’s ceremony, too. It’s as if membership in this particular set of mourners trumps their own personal mourning.
Army, Marine, and Air Force service members have arrived and have spent the last fifteen minutes staking out three corners of the gravel lot. As if to show up the others, the Marines, dressed in blue, are already standing at strict attention. Among the families, sunglasses come out.
George Frankel reads aloud the names and military honors of each veteran as each honor guard performs its intricately choreographed ceremony. Beside me, a man whispers to his young son, and seemingly partly to himself, “And it’s not a real shoot. It’s just a pretend shoot. And I’m not sure what the symbolism is for the shooting. I don’t know.” He pauses and looks up at the Marines in their pressed and starched blues. “Maybe we can look that up. When we get home, do you want to do that?”
The boy doesn’t really respond. He’s watching with the openmouthed concentration of a toddler as the Air Force honor guard snaps to attention, whisking their M-I Garand rifles skyward as one. A few minutes later, the Army guard members perform their own intricate choreography, and a baby-cheeked, stone-faced soldier presents a folded American flag to Lesley Cullen, whose husband Bill won several awards for his service in Vietnam. Her eyes widen some as she steadies herself and swallows hard. It’s like watching a woman who’s not used to having doors held open for her. I scan the lot for Kathleen and Damian Leopard. The parents of Mistofeles the cat are standing at one corner of the squat boathouse, looking on with expressions of interest and conviction.
Four times the service members go through their formations and shoot into the air, and four times, a serviceman holds a bugle to his lips and “Taps” is played. I find out later that it’s a recording, but in this moment, it sounds nothing less than immediate. They must march past Dumpsters swarming with gulls, and sometimes around steel pillars and cement pilings. Of course they do this with aplomb. It is their job, and their unflappable countenances come across by turns, to me, as professionalism and slight disdain for the unorthodox setting.
After the last honor guard hands over the last flag, Don goes to the center of the lot and claps his hands. “This concludes the presentation of military honors,” he says. In seamless transition he then reminds everyone that they can purchase “some of the best shrimp in South Carolina” at the shrimp house of Wayne Magwood. This is Magwood’s lot we’re standing in.
While Don talks, the families are fanning themselves with their programs. An Airman quietly approaches one of the wives and presents her with the spent shells from the military salute. She nods and accepts them and then spends the rest of Don’s talk staring down at them there in her hand.
It’s been close to two hours in the muggy, dusty heat, and Margo Dolan, gray-bobbed matriarch and widow of Ed, a.k.a. “Pooh,” is fanning herself with one of the morning’s green paper programs. She tosses me an easygoing smile as she leans against her car, waiting for her offspring to round up their own offspring. Tomorrow looks to be smooth sailing; she’s checked the weather report.
“So we don’t have to worry about motion sickness. They say there’s only one time someone got really, really sick on one of these trips. They were convulsing. And they had to call the Coast Guard to get them!”
Considering that every Eternal Reefs voyage means rounding up a group of potentially emotional strangers and putting them out to sea on a hundred-foot fishing boat together, the odds of witnessing at least one dramatic event seem pretty good, I say.
Margo sees it differently. The fact that it’s a group event lends it an emotional stability. “In fact, it’s kind of strange, but since all these people are doing the same thing, you feel kind of a camaraderie.”
Half a year ago, when her husband died of cancer, things were different. “Since Ed was sick for so long, when he died, I just wanted some space for myself.” They were living in Louisiana, where they had no immediate family, and the prospect of organizing a funeral in the midst of her own grief was just out of the question. “The funeral thing is a hard thing,” she says. “You’ve just lost a loved one and then you have to go through all that stuff that is not natural for you to be doing: going to the funeral home, standing there, greeting everybody, making the small talk and making all the decisions about, you know, the body and the coffin and everything.” Margo thought she’d feel guilty about her no-funeral decision; she waited for that feeling, but it never came. Just before he died, her husband signed off on creating a coral reef ball with Eternal Reefs.
Everyone here seems to be haunted by memories of some funeral past, and Margo is no exception. “I had,” she takes a deep breath, “a brother who died when I was young, and that was just the most awful time for my parents.” She’s gone with Eternal Reefs to avoid “the special cars, and the procession and the opening of the grave …” She straightens up. “You know, it’s just not for me. Maybe some people get comfort out of that, you know? But there should be another option, and this is a wonderful option.”
Her family arrives. We wave good-bye, and then she disappears into a blue station wagon and is gone. The lot is empty again, save for seven concrete reef balls that stand alone, still stones in the shade of the dusty lot.
On land, the artificial reef balls are awkward, unwieldy, and extremely heavy beasts. Like penguins or porpoises, their true beauty and potential are best grasped when viewed in their natural habitat: at work in the salty deep. A cable television special captured dramatic footage of artificial reefs that had spent a full decade on the ocean floor. Covered in algae and plant life and eroded some with the years, they look organic; beautiful and worn and almost ethereal in that way of organisms of the demersal deep. At 235 to 4,000 (yes, 4,000) bottom-heavy pounds each, the reef balls are built not to budge. Don Brawley tells me he’s performed follow-up dives to check on colonies of reefs they’ve placed in spots where hurricanes have blown through. Not a one has ever moved. One selling point is the fact that the reefs are designed to last more than five hundred years. That’s far longer than most traditional graves.
The next morning at the dock feels like summer camp. Shorts and T-shirts abound, and the air holds a sense of imminent adventure. Small children are stopped and rubbed down or sprayed with sunblock. One pair of toddlers wearing Barbie and Spiderman life vests chase each other around and around the wooden walkways.
Eternal Reefs has chartered two fishing boats. One is loaded with the seven artificial reef balls, and the other, the 110-foot Thunderstar, will carry the six families (one of the deceased has no family or friends here today) and founder Don Brawley. About five miles out to sea, the boats will rendezvous, and there, the reef balls will join about seventy others some forty feet below on the ocean floor.
That is what is supposed to happen, if everything goes according to plan. Of course, the sea being what it is, and Mother Nature being what she is, events are not so smooth on every voyage. Sometimes it’s stormy and the excursion must be canceled altogether. On other days, the weather appears fine, but the sea is too rough to lower the reefs properly. The families have been told about these possibilities and they know what to expect. Already today, things are running late. We were supposed to be off by eight o’clock this morning, but that time comes and goes. Half an hour later, instead of any stressed-out fits or other signs of the impatient need for control that can take hold of people in funereal situations, this group remains remarkably relaxed. They’re swapping fishing and diving stories—or, like Bob Allen, looking out quietly at the water.
Bob Allen is one of those white-haired seniors you just know could take you in an arm-wrestling match. He’s hale. He has these great teeth. And there’s something else: A nimbus of thoughtfulness and alacrity that feels magnetic here in this bright morning sun out on the dock. He’s also freshly the widower of Diane Allen.
“I’m seventy-two,” is the first thing he says. “I met her when I was eleven, so that’s sixty-one years ago. We actually grew up together and went to school together. About a year after graduation from high school, we got married. And were married about fifty-two years. Little over fifty-two. It was an amazing, amazing period.”
He sounds astonished, like he’s recounting something he himself has just learned, and his voice grows increasingly hoarse with emotion as he speaks, but he doesn’t stop. He talks about their three children and all the places they lived in California, his wife’s painting and all the eccentric people her art appreciation brought into their lives. Except he doesn’t pluralize that last word. “Life” is what he says.
He pauses here. “I mean, it was nothing really complex.” And a couple of minutes later: “It was nothing really interesting.” But then he’ll say, after a longer pause, “It was just an extraordinary life.” His work as an engineer allowed the couple to travel. Nothing really great, he says. He tells a story about traveling to Denmark in the dead of winter. “And I mean, it was absolutely frozen!” But the couple used the opportunity to take a train to Sweden and back. “It was just incredible.”
By “incredible,” he means the trip to Sweden and the opportunity to travel in general, but also the quality of their trips together and the whole of Diane’s life, which was his life as well until recently. Tears now run freely down his face, but he continues talking, gesturing as he does. They frequented the ocean and the mountains. They hiked. They scuba-dived. “And we lived by the ocean the last third of our life.” He wipes his cheeks finally, shakes his head, smiling. “Through it all, it’s been a remarkable life.” And there, he stops talking.
It’s time to board. As quickly as that happens, the boat leaves the dock and we’re zipping down Shem Creek in the direction of the Atlantic. Over one hundred feet in length, the Thunderstar looks majestic from the outside. Being a passenger makes me think of something a friend once said about New York City: So vast, so little personal space. There’s a covered aft deck and a long cabin lined with booths and tables. Atop this sits another, larger roof deck. There’s also a narrow walkway that traverses the perimeter—but as on most sea vessels, each of these spaces, save the roof deck, feels snug.
I head straight for the roof. It’s a stunning view. As we depart, we watch the blue that surrounds us widen in the morning light until it’s an unbroken expanse but for the green strip of land retreating behind. It feels like we’re flying. Another fishing boat zips past us, speeding back toward shore. Gulls and pelicans fan out like a pennant behind it, undulating en masse and diving for fish in the long slipstream.
Lesley Cullen and her mother, Penny, watch our own boat’s wake. Lesley’s husband, Bill, died last August from a brain tumor. He was fifty-eight. He was also, as summarized by Lesley, a building inspector, a skier, a scuba diver, and a master woodworker. But what Bill Cullen was most proud of was his job in the water rescue squad on New Jersey’s Passaic River. He was also a Vietnam vet and a firefighter. A busy man. “Oh, yeah. He did everything,” says Lesley, rapidly chewing her gum. She talks fast. An energetic blonde in her early fifties, she’s attractive in the sinewy, bronzed way of women who spend a lot of active time in the outdoors. As she talks, I envision a closet at her home devoted to wetsuits and skis and those hiking backpacks with frames.
After Bill was diagnosed, Lesley says his fellow firefighters threw a big party in his honor, “with lots of beer. He was a Budweiser lover, and loved to party.” When he died, Lesley says they had “the big-deal fireman’s funeral with bagpipes and everything.”
“And that was what Bill wanted,” she says, talking rapidly. “But this is what he really, really wanted, I think.” Final rest in the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to four other places: Lesley has also scattered or buried Bill’s ashes on his favorite Vermont ski run, underneath the apple tree in their backyard, in the Passaic River, and below the window of his building-inspection office, “because he liked to be everywhere,” she says. She wanted to scatter in Jamaica, too, “but I was afraid the airport sniffer dogs might stop me.”
In its creative variety, Bill Cullen’s last wishes have a lot in common with those of many Americans. Right this moment, dead Americans across the continent are getting made into diamonds and ink drawings. A business in Illinois will make you into actual plant fertilizer so that Aunt Maggie really can feed her favorite rosebush for years to come. Another company, called Celestis, will shoot your ashes out into a victory lap around the planet for less than it costs to fly to London. “Today we are opening the space frontier for all of us,” announces the website of their partner company, Space Services, Inc. In ten years of business, the company has flown the cremains of hundreds of people, including James Doohan (that’s Scotty of Star Trek fame) and one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, L. Gordon Cooper. After-death experiences marketed toward lifelong passions are way up in the sky and down in the dirt—and they’re multiplying.
And while most new memorialization options seem to involve ashes, some do not. If the family of Mistofeles had decided they wanted to hold on to a lifelike version of their cat, there’s an array of companies willing to compete for their business. My favorite is Perpetual Pet, a freeze-drying service. Unlike taxidermy, pet owners who opt for freeze-drying reclaim their entire pet, rather than just its out-sides molded over an artificial form. “This allows pet owners to see, touch and hold their pets,” reads their web copy, “and in a sense, ‘never have to let go.’” It’s true; Perpetual Pet’s site is full of photographs from satisfied customers, of their Persians, Pomeranians—and even one lop-eared rabbit—all seated in lifelike poses. I just can’t stop thinking of the extra dimension this would add to one’s life. The explanation to new visitors. The dusting.
“And it’s amazing,” said Eternal Reefs’ George Frankel, “how few funeral directors have even thought about it. I mean, they’re selling keepsake jewelry and stuff like that, but they don’t take it to that next step and say, ‘Okay, how much is there out there that we can offer these families?’”
There’s the memorialization business, which is this geyser of new innovations, and then there’s the funeral business. Ninety percent of funeral homes across the country are still family-run independents, passed from father to son and daughter, and largely, the dismal trade is still a conservative one, based more on tradition, trust, and insularity than on openness, supply and demand, and innovation.
Like other entrepreneurs trying to break in, George Frankel finds this to be excruciating, especially when he compares it to enterprises like his own. The funeral industry, he says, is “one of the stodgiest businesses I have ever seen,” although he does concede that there’s a gulf of trust to be bridged between the traditional service and businesses like Eternal Reefs. “And this I understand. ‘How do I know who these guys are, and am I going to turn my families over to them?’”
Increasingly, the answer is, “Sure.” Now that Eternal Reefs has been around for more than a decade and has enjoyed spots on the Discovery Channel and in the New York Times, more people are walking into more funeral homes and saying, “My father loved deep-sea fishing. What’s this reef thing I’ve heard about?”
Something’s working. And it’s about a lot more than the allure of thriving coral, the brilliance of a dramatic painting (ArtInAshes.com), the sparkle of a diamond pendant (Lifegem Memorial Diamonds), or the attraction to any of these products created from ashes. There’s also repulsion at work: that modern discomfort many of us feel when we’re presented with a dusty old urn up on a mantle filled with cremains. Or a cemetery. Americans lead lives that are increasingly transient. You may live out your toddler-through-teen years in a small mill town in Washington state, but chances are you will not still be there when you hit thirty. Today, the average person might call three or five cities and towns “home” over the course of a lifetime. Meanwhile, our siblings and stepsiblings are leading completely separate geographic journeys. So it’s not exactly shocking that the enduring phenomenon of the family burial plot, that after-death “home,” is in decline. Only about a third of all cremations are interred in a cemetery, and there’s no precise research about the destinations of the other two-thirds. However, consumer options for scattering ashes are skyrocketing, and national parks are reporting an increase in the number of permits requesting to scatter. Increasingly, our eternal homes are those multiple places that have moved us and given us refuge throughout our lifetimes: our backyard gardens, the Atlantic Ocean, the Passaic River.
Halfway to the spot where we’ll deploy the reef balls, it’s time to decorate the tribute memorials, announces Don Brawley over the boat’s loudspeaker. Like many good inventions, the miniature tribute memorials came about as a result of near disaster. It happened on one early Eternal Reefs voyage. The day was sunny and bright, but the seas were turbulent. They sailed to their appointed spot several miles out and waited for the water to calm. And then they waited some more—and bobbed and swayed and waited. Turned out the water was too choppy to lower the reef balls at all, and it looked like the entire trip—with its invested plans, hopes, and plane tickets—was a bust. It was then that Don spotted one of the small-scale models he’d brought on board to show people. They’re the same mushroom-cap shape as the real reef balls, with the same holes, but small enough to grasp in two hands. “And I said, ‘Since we can’t put the reefs out, why don’t we give all the families the reef models and let ’em decorate them with the flowers we have on the boat? And we can still give them closure to this.’” On every voyage since, they’ve done this: decorated the small replicas and ended the day by dropping them overboard. The invented ritual now has a name—the tribute memorial ceremony—and having been so named, has acquired the feel of a rite: at once organic and traditional.
The families, mostly the women, gather on the covered aft deck. There, the small reef-ball replicas wait on a table ordinarily used for cleaning fish. Next to the table are buckets filled with roses of every color, carnations and daisies, lilies and black-eyed Susans, baby’s breath and daffodils. Some women set right to work in the manner of expert flower arrangers, trimming stems and placing blooms of complementary colors and heights into the small holes—as if sticking flowers into miniature artificial reef balls were something they passed the time doing for every special occasion. Some of the mothers gather with their kids on the floor of the boat, where the work is more haphazard and wild, and soon the entire aft deck is a riot of stems and leaves and blossoms of violet, pink, crimson, and green.
Don has tasked me with decorating the tribute memorial for Richard Paraska, the man without any family here this weekend. I start braiding daisies and peach-colored roses into a chain, which I loop around and around the concrete replica. There is no single good method, but we all stick to this assigned arts-and-crafts project with avid concentration. As we work, I am struck by a feeling of historic parallel. A hundred years ago families would wash their loved ones’ bodies. This piece of concrete I’m lavishing with purple, crepe-papery statice and pink alstroemeria has nothing to do with Richard Paraska. But because we humans are so good at conceiving of the transubstantial, at assigning symbols and stand-ins, what we are doing, what I am doing, becomes a modern version of that old process, several times removed.
Soon, the lonely-looking replicas are transformed; the most embellished resemble bouquets, and they all look something like Easter, that time of renewal. I stick a few more sprigs of greenery into mine and stand back. It’s one of the simpler memorials, but it’s pretty. I hope I’ve done Mr. Paraska justice.
The families have retreated to the boat’s various corners as we zip across the open water. Now the Thunderstar makes little leaps across the waves, and it’s a bit of a job to maintain one’s balance. Inside the cabin, everything vibrates with the thrum of the motor. I steady myself by holding on to the back of one of the booths that line the walls, stopping to fix my eyes on the horizon out the window. It smells in here—like port-a-potty disinfectant and plastic and salt and fish. All these strong sensations, the motor’s dull roar, the smell, and the jostling, take up a lot of immediate attention and it’s hard to remember, at every moment, why we’re all here. Ten minutes ago, we were decorating the tribute memorials, but now everyone’s snacking. Small coolers appear. People get their food and retreat back to their family groups.
We bounce along the three-foot swells and then we’re slowing and then we’re idling. We’ve reached a spot that resembles every other spot around us exactly, except that here, forty-five feet below, there is a colony of man-made reefs. About a quarter of a mile away, we see the other boat, the one carrying the artificial memorial reef balls.
White-haired Bob Allen wends his way toward me, laughing as he grasps at railings to steady himself. I ask how he’s doing. “I’m doing great! I’m doing great,” he says, and he looks it. The open sea air seems to have crystallized a hardy relish about him.
Don announces over the loudspeaker that the reef deployment will begin shortly, and people crowd onto the rear deck with cameras and children slung around their necks.
Laws vary by state, governing how Eternal Reefs can place its reefs. South Carolina has designated a number of artificial reef sites, stretches of seafloor with flat, sandy soil that are relatively close to other so-called “live bottom” areas, in order to attract sea life. The site we’re adding to today has been there about six years.
The state program’s raison d’être has nothing to do with Don Brawley’s mantra of emotional closure and reef preservation. Instead, it’s about commerce. Later on the phone, the state’s artificial reef coordinator, the amiable Bob Martore, tells me that instead of considering things like preventing coastal erosion, “we try to space the sites out so that people with differently sized boats can access them.” This site’s location, some five miles offshore, makes it a really good fishing spot for smaller boats. This final memorial and resting place, from South Carolina’s point of view, is basically a fish nursery. “And it does prevent overfishing in other live-bottom areas,” he adds. “We’re just putting down structure that acts as a substrate for the type of undersea community that would inhabit this area anyway.”
Here’s how this state-regulated structure—that is, the artificial reef containing the remains of your Uncle Nick—transforms into the picturesque organic wonderland splashed on every page of Eternal Reefs’ website. Once it’s placed, the artificial reef attracts hundreds of tiny creatures, the soft corals that cling to and encrust its rough concrete surfaces. Hydroid corals look like tufty white dandelions up close; en masse, like those giant star-like firecracker bursts. There are bryozoans and also encrusting sponges. Then come the barnacles, oysters, and tiny, antennaed porcelain crabs that live inside the reef’s soft folds and crevasses. Next, the small swimmers arrive: the fiercely defensive blennies, who use their lips to scrape algae from hard surfaces, and the myriad species of gobies that feed upon all these creatures. Next in the chain are the slightly larger porgies, pigfish, and grunts, and finally, the chief quarry of fishermen and the reason for this reef’s existence: king and Spanish mackerel. Spotted sea trout and redrum, black sea bass, zebra-striped sheepshead and silvery-gray spadefish. Forty feet below us, about the height of a four-story building, a reef built of some seventy manmade balls upholds an entire bustling ecosystem.
Back on the surface, there’s only the rolling gray-green water. The Thunderstar bobs in circles. The second boat’s crew seems to be bustling around with some rigging. It’s not clear what they’re doing, but whatever it is takes ten minutes. On the family boat, people fall into private conversation, and a few disappear back into the air-conditioned cabin. Every few minutes, Captain Leary starts up the grumbling motor and maneuvers our drifting vessel back into place. It’s beginning to smell like diesel fuel here on the aft deck.
Bob looks at me and shrugs good-naturedly. “Well, only time will tell,” he says. Some minutes later, Don gets back on the loudspeaker. “I believe our guys are now ready. Our first memorial reef will be Diane L. Allen.” Don repeats her name a second time. It sounds rather like he’s paging her, and just like yesterday when he announced the shrimp for sale, there’s that strange impersonal feeling. Then again, my account is rapidly becoming unreliable since I’m concentrating hard on maintaining a bright outlook, which hinges on my maintaining a chicken biscuit, coffee, and juice in their proper places in my digestive tract as we bob and sway, bob and sway.
We watch as the crew on the other boat secures Diane Allen’s reef ball to the rigging and swings it out over the side. Bob’s face is a map of heightened emotion whose complexity cancels out any one simple expression, a balloon filled almost to bursting.
They lower Diane’s ball into the water, but then it comes back up. This happens again, and a third time. (Later, Don tells me that the mechanism they use requires that the line go slack in order to release a reef ball. “In the area where those reefs are, we tend to have some pretty good currents, so that was part of the problem. And then the release mechanism itself got twisted.”) The moments are fraught with an increasing sense of drama; it seems uncertain whether this process will work today.
All at once, the terms created for this weekend swirl around my brain, divorced of their meanings. Tribute memorial, reef viewing, reef dedication. Solemn things, my brain tells my body. My body doesn’t care. It has rebelled. Quickly, I make my way back toward the cabin and gesture toward the paper bags piled there; a man standing in the doorway hands me one with wordless haste. The sack is comically narrow and the boat is jostling so much that it seems like trying to use the bag would defeat, and then gleefully mock, the purpose, so instead I just head for the end of the boat farthest from the families and lean out over the side, where, as inconspicuously as possible, I lose my breakfast directly over a colony of beautiful undersea memorial reefs.
When I get back, they’re still trying to drop Diane Allen’s reef ball. Inside the cabin, a number of people sit hunched over or sprawled out in the booths. They are pallid and silent. One seasick woman hasn’t left the toilet stall since the boat first stopped over the reefs. Feeling slightly better now myself, I grab a bottle of water and head back out on deck.
Diane Allen’s ball is still being lowered and raised. At one point, it clunks against the side of the boat, drawing gasps from everyone. Finally, it goes down into the water again and the claw-like hooks that held it emerge empty. On the loudspeaker, Don announces a successful deployment and people applaud. Bob’s family members hug one another, and he wipes his eyes. He catches my eye and winks, bittersweet.
The next couple of reef balls go down without a problem, but then on the following two the same repeated raising and lowering occurs. The reef ball for Bill Cullen, that jack of so many trades, is one of the last to go, and it takes the crew a very long time to maneuver it into place. I am sitting on a water cooler by the cabin door with a cold water bottle across my eyelids when I hear Lesley shout in her quick, birdlike voice, “Budweiser!” Seconds later, there is a small cheer as the ropes emerge from the water empty, his reef placed. Lesley is ecstatic, bouncing by and pulling out her cell phone after she and her mother grip each other in a quick hug. “You won’t believe it,” she tells the person on the phone, her sister. “They just lowered his reef, and it was being a pain in the neck. Took, like, twenty minutes! Because it was Bill, being difficult. And then I said, ‘Budweiser,’ and off it went. Of course!”
The final reef, belonging to Mistofeles the Cat, is lowered without incident.
The heat, the boat’s pitching, and the seesawing suspense and relief of the last hour and a half have all been trying. Yet attention refocuses quickly for the Tribute Memorial Ceremony. Don again announces each name over the loudspeaker, and wives and husbands (and in one case, owner) toss their small beflowered models into the sea. It’s an activity that embraces the families, again, with the reassurance of participation. There is no depending on the mood of the ocean, the functionality of rope-and-pulley systems, or fishing-boat crew. There is only the feel of concrete in hands, and then letting go and watching as the small, adorned ornaments disappear into the waves.
The last tribute memorial is dropped, and Don reads an excerpt from the speech by John F. Kennedy that talks about our ocean origins: “All of us have, in our veins[,] the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back from whence we came.” It’s a stirring moment, and then it’s over. There’s a click and a hiss over the loudspeaker, and Don says that this concludes today’s memorial reef dedication. Less than a full minute later, Captain Leary starts up the boat again, and we gather speed. We travel fast, faster than on the way out, skimming atop the water headlong into the clean air. A few sickly faces emerge from the cabin, and the fresh wind evaporates the sweat from them. They join others who stand aft, put their arms around one another, and watch the wake we churn up and abandon, tracing a path from them to their past that is soon obliterated by the rolling, tossing waves.