The Road Trip North

"You're late, the next funeral is scheduled to start in mere moments so it would be appreciated if we can be quick about this!"

John's Funeral Arrangement Service was extremely busy, the irritation was barely masked in the funeral attendant's barbed words.  She was right, I was late. Death waits for no man, but here I was still late. Rush hour traffic is murder.

I mumbled a few meaningless words of apologies and we then finished loading the coffin into the van and departed, Mother would be fine in there and she'd now have the last road trip she always wanted. It did mean an overnight stay for her outside our house in the van as it was too late to start the journey by the time everything was ready, but since this was in late March it meant that the winter temperature would help preserve her until she got back north to her final resting place.

In the midst of all of this, our daughter had gotten acute appendicitis that required an immediate operation and was in the hospital with my wife, recovering from the surgery that thankfully went well. That meant it was just the two of us that night, me and my son.

The next morning, we headed out on the icy roads with our precious cargo for her last journey. My son, the young explorer, was coming along for the ride, as were my uncle and one of mother's dearest friends. A small convoy of honor guards in three cars for her last journey back home.

We stopped regularly along the way for some light snacks and biobreaks at the usual pit stops, the white van that was now her hearse parked innocuously outside while tourists flitted by blissfully unaware that there was a coffin inside it.

It didn't even occur to me at the time that what we were doing was all that unusual or whether it was even legally allowed to transport a body in this way. This was just what we had agreed on with her before she died and it felt natural in the moment - even if she was probably too far gone at that point to realize what kind of logistics it would involve to transport her body these 500 miles up north through snow and mountain passes at the cusp of winter.

At the last stop before reaching our destination Siglufjörður, chance or fate had arranged for us to run into Orren the farmer who she had been married to all those years ago.  He was sitting inside with a few of his fellow farmers, discussing something.

He had called her in the hospital during one of her final conscious moments a day or two before her death, to say goodbye or something similar and I ended up being the reluctant man in the middle passing along words not my own. She didn't want to talk to him directly, but told me to thank him for calling. I did.

A few days after she had passed, he called again to express his condolences and to ask when the funeral would be as he wanted to attend. I told him that that it had already taken place, which was true even if her final journey had still not been completed and her coffin was right outside our door at that point. When we talked about it she had expressed a desire for a quiet funeral and we did our best to comply, but her close friends and family could not be denied a last opportunity to say goodbye.

A bigger man than me might have talked to him directly, told him what journey we were on and allowed him to either join us or say his goodbyes to her coffin there at the final stop.

I didn't, in my eyes he was neither family nor a close friend even if they had two children together. If my brother had been there I would have deferred the decision to him and respected it, but he wasn't.

The last leg of the journey was through a treacherous mountain range that I had had frequent nightmares about as a child. It had paved roads now for the most part of it except where the whole mountainside has been slowly but surely sliding into the ocean for the last 50 years or so, a few centimeters every day. At some point, it will probably reach a critical mass and disappear into the ocean in one big mudslide, along with anyone unlucky enough to be driving over it at that point.  In the meantime, it is kept functional by bulldozers shoveling filler material on top of the cracks every few months so that cars can keep using it.

When we arrived in town, we drove through it in silence and went deep into the fjord were the new cemetery was located.

An open grave waited for us to arrive, my uncle had taken care of the arrangements. The evening was pitch black outside as it was late and it then started snowing as if on cue. Icelanders are rumored to have hundreds of different words describing different types of bad weather, and in particular snow.
The word for this would have been 'Slydda' or possibly 'Skafrenningur', both of which roughly translate to different degrees of windy, wet and cold.

Her youngest brother that lived in the next fjord was also there, waiting for us and helping with the last steps. We managed to get her coffin outside using ropes and pulleys, it was heavy and difficult to maneuver but we were eventually able to get it lowered into the grave for her final resting place and then waited in silence as it was filled up with dirt and this part of the journey ended.

She was home now, we had honored her last request.