Mardi Gras was hot this year. The afternoon sun beat down on the French Quarter’s iron balconies, casting shadows on the celebration below. In the beer- and sweat-soaked streets, crowds of shining people swayed to faraway music—the drinks spilling, the brass glimmering, the river slipping silently by.
These are the sights and sounds that have brought Kirsten Stimmel to New Orleans since she was 23. “We were young,” she said of her first Mardi Gras. “And we drank a lot, and didn’t catch many parades but had a good time anyway.”
Thirty years later, the celebration still calls for drinks. But this year, the revelry is something more.
As she danced through the French Quarter this Mardi Gras, Stimmel carried a tote bag. It held an empty beer can, a cast-off, coarse and brightly colored wig, a bottle of lotion, a tube of mascara and a plastic baggy full of fine, pale dust. These were her father’s ashes.
“New Orleans has a rhythm that both my dad and I fit in,” Stimmel said on the phone at her home in Pine Harbor, Georgia. Her father, Carl Stimmel, was a naval officer and a lawyer—“a big guy with a big joy for life,” Stimmel said, “and he always loved the city.”
“People who aren’t from New Orleans have this idea in their head that Mardi Gras is some kind of terrible debauchery, and. . .there are parts of it that are debauchery, but the thing that I love the most and the reason that I keep coming back every year is that I love the family celebrations,” Stimmel said.
As a young man in the 1950s, Stimmel’s father attended Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, and played drums in a band, his daughter said. Each weekend he and his friends would drive into the Crescent City to gig at clubs on Bourbon Street.
Neon signs light the French Quarter’s Bourbon Street at dusk on Saturday, March 4, 2023, in New Orleans, La. Kirsten Stimmel’s father, Carl Stimmel, played gigs as a drummer in the Quarter during the 1950’s.
Since he passed away in 2020, the Stimmels have been scattering Carl’s ashes in the places he loved the most.
“I asked my mom and my brother if it’d be okay with them if I spread some in the Mississippi, and they said yes, so that’s how the idea started,” Stimmel said.
“None of it went smoothly,” said Christine Neelis, a long-time family friend who joined Stimmel for the Mardi Gras memorial.
The steps leading to the river were thronged with people, so the pair decided to climb to the water’s edge via the rocks nearby. “And they’re wobbly,” Neelis said. “We tried four different ways to get down there. At one point, I was below her, and she threw me the bag he was in, and I was like, ‘Holy s— the river is right here, and it’s going fast and I’m tipsy, and you are too, and we’re walking down rocks!’”
Eventually they arrived where the Mississippi River met the rocks. There, Stimmel said a few words in memory of her father and overturned the plastic bag.
“Some of him flew onto Christine’s shoe,” Stimmel said.
“It was kind of. . .exactly how you’d want it to be. . .We cried, and then we climbed back up,” Neelis said with a smile.
Above them, a crowd of strangers had gathered. One of them offered Stimmel a hand and gave her a hug.
Beside this silent river, on the edge of the whirling Quarter, quiet moments were punctuated by sudden, drunken sirens. Each year, the streets are swept of beads and washed of beer, but memories of long-ago carnivals, since-closed clubs and departed onlookers remain.
“Now my dad’s in the Mississippi, and those waters will take him everywhere,” Stimmel said. “He would have liked that.”
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