A Thousand Whales and a Death Store
A Thousand Whales and a Death Store
Mothers, fathers, water, and whales come together in Maui
The first time I heard the song of a humpback whale, I fell in love. My mother and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment on Lonsdale Road in Toronto, and one evening, she brought home an album of whale recordings called Songs of the Humpback Whale. We listened to the record together and smiled with excitement. I was seven years old. The two of us had just moved back to Toronto after living for a year with her boyfriend in his photo studio in old Montreal. I was happy in Montreal. I didn’t know why they broke up and why we had to leave. It was our fourth move in three years. Our one-bedroom apartment in Toronto had a dresser in the middle to separate my mother’s side of the room from mine.
I was alone, starting over again. A new neighborhood and a new school. Trying to make friends but not trying too hard. I didn’t want to answer the questions I knew they would ask. Where’s your father? Where do you live? I knew it wouldn’t be long before we moved again.
I walked home from school alone. I knew every laneway and shortcut. I climbed up on the roof of Grace Church on the Hill to get above the street and feel the sun and wind on my face. There was no one at home, so there was no rush to get there. I was alone but free. I could go anywhere.
Our second-floor apartment faced the street. I had a key tied around a piece of string that I wore around my neck, but like most days, I forgot it at home. I scaled the front of our apartment building and climbed in through the window and into the living room, where the stereo was waiting. I listened to music and read through my mother’s magazine collection - back issues of Vogue and Playboy.
I fell in love with the music as I sat on the floor, listening to my mother’s records and absorbing the album covers. Airto, Roxy Music, Joan Armatrading. I ran my fingers along the covers, memorizing the textures. The records spoke to me in different languages about love and longing and faraway places.
Music was different from the songs of humpback whales. The whales sang to me from the water. The vibrations pulsed through my body like I was the ocean, and I soaked the sounds into my heart. Whale songs felt close and eternal.
I didn’t know my father. We met a few times, usually on the street. We’d go for a walk and talk, though I don’t remember what we talked about. I called him by his first name, Dalton. Other kids had fathers, which seemed strange to me. There were no fathers around in my family. Not for my cousin or me. The friends I made didn’t know their fathers. We understood each other. We had something to prove.
I was curious about my father and his life and why he wasn’t around, but I didn’t let anyone know. I listened hard for any news, but my mother never talked about him. I heard my father had grown up not knowing his father, and I wondered whether that was just how it was for some people. I heard he had been living in Hawaii, working with Greenpeace to save the whales. He had been back in Toronto for a few years, and I had seen him once or twice. Maybe I had heard it all from him. I thought he must be doing something important. I imagined my father in Hawaii as I listened to the Songs of the Humpback Whale record.
It took me 33 years to see Hawaii and the whales for myself. My wife Saira and I had moved from New York City to Seattle with our daughter and son. Seattle winters were dark and wet, and our family quickly learned that a week of sunshine had the power to ease our annual vitamin D deficiency and upper respiratory trauma. On our first trip to Maui in 2013, we were swimming twenty feet from the beach, and I dove under the water and heard the whales singing. It sounded like they were next to me.
“You can hear the whales in the water!” I shouted to Saira and the kids.
They put their heads under the water to try for themselves. “Wow. Cool.” They were surprised and interested, and I was transported. As a family, we fell in love with Maui and the whales and have returned 7 or 8 times over the last 12 years.
Over the last 12 years, we’ve visited Oahu, the Big Island, Kauai, and Maui, always in the fall or winter. The trips are timed with the kids’ February school break, which is also when the humpback whales visit to breed. My children were both born in New York City, but they grew up visiting Hawaii.
In February, we returned to Maui after a three-year hiatus. I wasn’t sure whether it was a good idea to visit the island after the terrible August fires, but I heard from people I knew who had friends and family on the island that it was important for tourists to return, so we did.
We had never seen so many whales. “There are 1,000 whales in the waters around Maui right now,” our whale-watching guide told us on the deck of the Maui Nui catamaran. All around us, whales surfaced and breached. I wondered what it was that bonded me to them. I couldn’t take my eyes off the water. My body buzzed, and I shouted with joy every time I saw or heard a whale. “The mothers swim 3,000 miles from Alaska to give birth, and the males make the trip to mate with the females,” the guide continued. There were slicks of whale sperm on the surface of the water, visible from the deck of our boat. “There are no predators here, but there’s also no food, so they don’t eat for the whole time they’re in Hawaii.”
The next morning, I kayaked with my daughter out into the ocean in front of our hotel. The whales were so loud we could hear them in the kayak. In the distance, in the deeper water, giant whales breached, one after the other, in what looked like a competition pod. We had learned the term on the Maui Nui as we watched a group of whales thrash around, all fins and tales and aggression.
Only the male humpbacks sing. The females and calves are quiet. The males make all sorts of sounds - grunts, clicks, whistles, and pulses. It’s a masculine vibration. I always thought the whale songs came from females. The mothers. The caregivers. But it’s the males who sing. The aspiring fathers. Driven by instinct to make new whales.
My daughter asked me whether I had heard about the croaking bullfrogs. “The males croak to attract females. But then they fall in love with the sound of their own voice and forget about the females.” We paddled further into the bay, towards the deeper water, the pelagic channel where the whales were breaching.
Away from the water, across the island, and up a small, lush hill on the north shore of Maui, there’s a death store. For years, I’ve been following Bodhi Be and his work on the subject of conscious dying. He started The Death Store and Doorway Into Light, a nonprofit organization and certified green funeral home. The Death Store is the storefront and entry into the funeral home, located in a small retail center in Haiku. Since learning about Bodhi Be’s work helping people and their families move through death with love and presence, I knew I had to visit.
I reached out to Bodhi Be by email a few weeks before our family trip to Maui. He was gracious and kind in his reply but wrote that he wouldn’t be available during our stay. He was planning to attend a conference in Tacoma on human composting and then decided not to travel off the island as his son was set to bring a child into the world. A grandson. He wanted to be with his son for the home birth.
Though Bodhi Be wouldn’t be there, I wanted to visit and see the store for myself. Saira and the kids came along. They knew I was curious and not making formal plans. They knew my heart had healed. I was healthy. I hadn’t thought I was healthy since I was 22 years old and first found out I had a dangerous genetic condition - acute familial hypercholesterolemia. Bypass surgery in 2018 cleaned out the blockages in my arteries. A vegan diet and a mix of pills and injections keep my cholesterol levels low. Technically, I’m a low-risk patient, and I’m not expecting to die anytime soon. I inherited my genetic condition from my father, who turned 80 this past August. His disease was much milder than mine. His father died of a heart attack. My father grew up not knowing his father. They got to know each other as adults.
My father called me a few years ago to tell me he had taken care of his death logistics. He gave me the name of an attorney who would handle the administrative details. The burial was arranged and paid for. I wouldn’t have to pay for anything, and I would receive the ashes. I think he wanted me to know that his death wouldn’t be a burden. He asked that I sprinkle his ashes at the base of a maple tree at the northern end of Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto. I had lived next to the park with my mother when I was a boy. The apartment after the apartment on Lonsdale Road. My father watched me play baseball in Trinity Park once or twice when I was a boy. I don’t know how he knew where to find me, but after he came out a few times, I didn’t see him again for more than a decade.
I don’t know what I was expecting to see at the Death Store. I’ve been to funerals and funeral homes, but they’ve always felt somber and disconnected from life. Preparing for heart surgery in 2018, I hired a law firm to prepare my will and advance directive. It was cold and impersonal work. I had seen a glimpse of death and realized I wanted to experience it as a part of life when it happens. Doorway Into Light introduced me to a warmer experience. I wonder how it will be when my mind and body separate. Will I let go?
The store was small and intimate. There was a faint smell of incense. The ceiling was low, and a bright hanging bulb lit the room. It felt welcoming and practical.
We walked into a conversation between the store’s host and a father and daughter. The father was preparing. He was sick and wasn’t sure how much longer he would be alive. His daughter was graceful and quiet, supporting her father, who smiled warmly, perhaps trying to ease the weight of death from the conversation. Perhaps this was his first opportunity to speak about logistics.
Perhaps I was imagining a conversation in my future. I was at the store to begin the dialogue, in part because I had been drawn to this place and these people and also because I had come close to death but then healed and recovered. The last time I had prepared for death, I felt rushed as I had only a few weeks between diagnosis and surgery. I wanted to be clearer. How did I want to die? How could I plan my death as a celebration of the precious life I’ve been granted? I had seen the thin line between life and death. How could I experience crossing the line from life to death with gratitude?
I took pictures and brochures and filed the different burial options in my mind for future death planning. If I choose to be buried at sea, they’ll wrap my body in a cotton shroud and weigh me down with sandbags to sink my body to the bottom of the ocean at the edge of the humpback whale marine sanctuary. It’s not my time to go yet. I want to live and continue to clear my attachments so that when I die, I am ready. My mind may move on into the emptiness I see glimpses of in meditation. But I like knowing that when I die, my body can rest with the whales.
I could have stayed longer and talked for hours with my new friends at Doorway Into Light, but the subject of death was less interesting for the rest of my family. “Let’s go,” my son said. We drove down the hill from Haiku and turned left on the Hana Highway toward Pa’ai. We stopped at Ho'okipa Lookout to take in the power of the ocean on a windy day. Then, shaved ice and tacos in Pa’ai and back to the hotel. We spent the rest of the afternoon swimming in the ocean on the west side of the island. I blew the air out of my lungs and dove under the water, sinking and sitting alone on the bottom, listening to the whales.