Ashes, ashes... we all fall down.

I didn't think about what it would look like if there was no wind. In my mind, there was always wind. But when it comes time to go through with it, the only thing that moves the water is the current of the river. When it comes time to watch the wind pick up the ashes and carry them over the water of the springs, there is no wind.

He falls into the water and sinks -- bone chips and carbon soot side by side -- and I wonder that I do not fall with him. The blues and greens of the Florida autumn reflect off the water like a a lyric in a James Taylor song, the sort that always makes me want to cry when I'm driving north, into the city, on 93 with my father. But a manatee reaches its snout up toward the sky and there's an insect hum behind me in the trees and everything feels so peaceful for a moment that it doesn't matter that the pale, pinkish ashes are smudged on my fingers and the last of him is creased into the sides of an Ikea tupperware.

I wish there was an alligator, to add an air of menace, or desperation. The manatees feel so normal, the large, soft angles of their scarred bodies rippling beneath the water that is always exactly seventy-two degrees. Manatees break so easily, chilled by cooler water or sliced by propellers, and their bodies show every white scar like military stripes on a young man's corpse. When I was a year old, they said he would never learn to walk again, that he could not train his legs to work on land or sea. I never knew him out of braces, without a wheelchair close by -- just in case! -- and a slow, crooked walk. But I never knew him not to walk.

I will pretend it was his left hand that I lost today. Perhaps at some point later on, I will lose his right hand, or his foot, and like that, piece by piece, he will disappear from me. Someday, I will lose his gash of a mouth, his coarse gray beard, his tired, slanting eyes. The braces will fall off his legs and he will hobble around, blind and deaf, but with me. Until eventually, all that I can keep from him will be the sound of his voice, the crack in my own as I say for the last time, "I love you; you have no idea how much." And when I lose that echo, when his, "Hello, dear!" finally fades away, then I will fall into the water with him and become silt. Still, but for the currents.