All at sea

The column Scattering his father-in-law's ashes on the waters of the Indian Ocean, Howard Jacobson is lost for words. Until he remembers the good ship Venus

Today I buried my father-in-law at sea. Buried is probably not the word for it. There was no body. What we did was cast his ashes to the four winds.

I've never seen a person's ashes before. I suppose I'd unthinkingly assumed that "ashes" was only a way of speaking, that what we burn down to is some sort of odoriferous powder, finer and sweeter-perfumed than talcum, and somehow still animated by soul. But we don't. We make the same sort of ash as a bonfire makes. Grey and grainy and unspiritual. Plenty of it, too. A whole plastic flaskful, which can take a fair bit of shaking out. Especially if your hands aren't steady.

I've never fancied being burned myself. I'm too worried about the possibility of a mistake. Imagine lying inside that highly flammable wooden lozenge and listening to it crackle while you're still alive, still able to hear the congregation singing "Jerusalem". Imagine the condition of your mind. Illogical, I know, given that you can be buried alive just as easily. But then I've never fancied the soil option either. Earth, water, air, fire - let those who were happy to live in the elements, die in the elements. You're either an earth's diurnal course man or you're not. I'm not. I keep hoping I can hold out long enough for someone to discover some new and more suitable medium for my expiry. Something less natural. Evaporation through abstruse sentence, say. Interment in metaphor.

Scatter me in words, O my beloved.

My father-in-law was lucky in that the elements spoke directly to him. He was a gardener, a garlic-grower, a pisser on to the roots of lemon trees, a maker of barbecues and fires, and a waterman - that's to say he swam, fished, sailed, and therefore understood and loved the capriciousness of the wind. What a bore he could be on each and all of those subjects! When he expatiated on boats to me, I thought I was dead already. He showed me nautical charts. He talked knots to me. Tides. Reefs. Rips. Sandbars. Fathoms. Channels. Fish. Masts. Sails. The lives of Dutch navigators, for Christ's sake! He clogged my brain with seaweed. He picked my bones clean with maritime minutiae.

But at least be knew how he wanted to be disposed of. Burned to soulless ash and scattered on to the waters of the Indian Ocean off Rottnest, the paradisal people's isle a half nautical hour from the port of Fremantle. And let the winds and tides and fish and fathoms do as they wished with him.

So that was where we repaired to do his bidding - his widow, his daughter, his old fishing and camping friend, Eric the ferryman, Eric's wife Dot, and me. There is always farce associated with the disposal of ashes: so of course we left him on the boat and had to run back for him, and of course we weren't able to open the plastic canister that contained him until his daughter found a way of breaking into it with a car key, and of course the wind blew half of him back into our faces. Life is three- quarters farce; it is only fitting that death should be the same.

"There is a willow grows aslant a brook ... " Nothing to do with Rottnest but it's great line when you're thinking about watery graves. There is, though, a wooden jetty which gives out into Thomson Bay and we sat on the end of that like urchins looking out for jelly fish and watched the water discolour with our husband and friend and father. We threw flowers after him - camellias from Dot's garden, and wild flowers, white and green and yellow everlastings, which his daughter had picked illegally from the roadside a thousand miles north of here. And so we made a floating memorial park for him.

Then we sang. Then they sang. No words, just a tune. "The Swan", by Saint-Saens. They'd been a quartet when they were young. Dot the singer, Joy on the piano, Eric on the violin, and the man who was now a faint discolouration of the Indian Ocean on the cello. "The Swan" had been his favourite. Forever harping on things watery, you see.

So here's a question. Which came first? Were we putting him back where he belonged? Or had his interest in water been nothing all along but a premonition of his fate?

He was blessed with a perfect day, however one understands it. Simultaneous showers and sunshine, the rain light and warm, and then a rainbow, especially vivid, as they always are in Western Australia, in the lilac section. Why not? As with farce, so with the pathetic fallacy. You get it in life, so there's no reason why you shouldn't get it in death.

I thought we were finished, ready to return to the living, when Eric suddenly began to speak in maritime tongues. Not an address, just a quiet, private blessing. He wished his old friend a fair wind. A billowing sail. A good landfall.

I felt shamed. Wasn't it incumbent on me, the English literature person, to essay something similar? Surely I had some apposite quotation. But the only nautical line I could think of was "'Twas on the good ship Venus". So much for a solid grounding in the classics.

What had happened to the John Masefield I'd read at school? What about all the Joseph Conrad I'd lectured on? What about Moby Dick? What about the "Ancient Mariner"? "Alone, alone, all, all alone/Alone on a wide, wide sea!" Wouldn't that do?

Pathetic. Better with the good ship Venus. He'd liked a touch of rhymed ribaldry in his time, Allan Sadler. He could take a seasoning of profanity. He knew it wasn't all "The Swan". So I let him have it - man to man, me to him, but silently, for no one else's ears. "By God, you should have seen us ... "