What is it about the act of spreading ashes after cremation that has so captured our imagination – in film, literature, and in our everyday life? While many of the world’s major religions are either lukewarm or hostile to the practice, (the notable exception being Hinduism), it’s become a common practice for survivors, providing a moment of both release and closure. It may be at the seashore where decades of family vacations were spent or from the mountaintop of a favorite hike. And I know of at least two instances where ashes were surreptitiously strewn – one of my husband’s brothers at Disneyland and a former colleague’s husband, who had been a uniformed Secret Service officer, in the White House Rose Garden.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the commercialization of death, a cottage industry has sprung up with ever more creative and dramatic ways to dispose of a loved one’s remains. You can send ashes into space, implant them in a coral reef, launch them as fireworks, or use the ashes as an organic base for planting a tree.You can of course bury them in the family plot, place them in a columbarium (or as a child once called it, a “come and bury ‘em”) or simply leave them on your mantel or in the back of the hall closet.
My own family chose none of these. Rather, ours has been a story of disinterest, denial, neglect, and sometimes simply being cheap.
Actually, my family managed the rituals of death quite well. For my parents and grandparents, there were well attended memorial services where family, friends, and colleagues shared fond remembrances and acknowledged contributions to the community, with carefully picked musical selections and readings, and a tasteful amount of flowers.These occasions allowed for a coming together of the grieving and created space for remembering.
But when it came to dealing with ashes, that’s when the wheels came off.
The roots of this story reach back to 1955, before I was born, actually before my parents even met, when my mother, at the age of 23, was faced with fulfilling her mother’s wish that her ashes be scattered in New York’s Central Park. I know so little of my maternal grandmother that I’m only guessing why she chose Central Park. New York City was where my grandparents had lived when they were first married, running far (at least in their minds) from their families upstate. Even after moving to the suburbs, they returned again and again to the city – to shop, attend the symphony, and go to the theater. As for my grandmother’s ashes, it’s a mystery about what happened, and I’m left to imagine that it was like the scene in The Big Lebowski where the moment of solemnity went south when John Goodman opens up a coffee can of cremains from a cliff overlooking the Pacific and the ocean breeze blows the ashes back on Jeff Bridges. But in any case, it was such an unpleasant experience that my mother made it quite clear that she wanted to relieve her children of the task when her time came.
My dad was unsentimental about death and the disposition of his body. “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” he once told me, sharing in the most abrupt manner that it is the act of living that make us who we are and the body itself has no value when life ends. He had no interest in cemeteries or other final resting places. I have a faint memory of being in the back seat in our old blue Dodge station wagon, at maybe six or seven years old, and riding past a graveyard. “What a waste,” my dad, the pediatrician, commented. “All that land should be playgrounds.”
For me, when it came to dealing with ashes,the story began in Atlanta, the place I was raised, when my father died, just shy of his 61st birthday, depleted after five years of chest surgeries, and multiple rounds of toxic chemotherapy and harsh radiation treatment.
I went with my exhausted mother to the funeral home to make all the necessary arrangements. It was what you would expect -- faint vaguely classical Muzak playing in the lobby, gladiolas in huge vases, and a funeral home director with a limp handshake. After being ushered into a small conference room, the intake process was straightforward: name, address, birth date, Social Security number, cremation or burial. And then came the question, “which one of these containers would you like?” as the funeral director waved to the sample urns on the shelves lining the walls. “None,” my mother said. And the ashes? “Just dispose of them.”
And then it was done. We walked back out into the parking lot, blinking at the sudden brightness and unexpectedly doubling over with laughter, having just lived out a scene from Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel about the funeral business, The Loved One.
Fourteen years later, I accompanied my mother to another funeral home, this time to make the arrangements for herself. Two years earlier, she had moved to Washington with the idea of spending more time with my family, with thoughts of lots of quality time with her two young granddaughters and being prepared for some undefined time in the future when it would be practical for me to be close by to help out with the inevitable tasks associated with age and infirmity.
The quality time was cut short when, shortly after her move, a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer meant that death would come soon. An organizer and do-er, my mom dove into planning for her death like any of the many other projects she’d managed and directed in years as a public health professional and community advocate. “This is good,“ she said as we drove back down to Washington from Baltimore after the doctor at Johns Hopkins had delivered the grim news. “With cancer, you can plan, which you can’t do if you drop dead from a heart attack.” I kept my eyes on the road while she started on her to-do list for dying.
So within a month or so, we were off to the funeral home to check the arrangements off her list. Once again, we sat side by side in an office decorated with gladiolas with another humorless funeral home director to take care of the paperwork. And again the same answers: no urn, just dispose of the ashes.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said looking up from his file. “We can’t do that. It’s illegal.”
My mother, though seated and frail from chemotherapy, pulled herself up straight to all 5’2” of her weakened frame. “That’s not true, “she said frostily. “When my husband died, they just disposed of the ashes.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he replied. “In this jurisdiction, it’s illegal. But we do have a relationship with a retired mortician who has a boat and for $100, he can take your ashes out in the Chesapeake Bay past the legal limit and dispose of them for you.”
“That’s a rip off and a scam,” she argued. “Mom,” I whispered, nudging her with my elbow. “You have $100. Just do it.”
She signed the forms, paid by check, and left muttering about the perceived injustice as only the child of the Great Depression would. For someone who would make a three-transfer trip to the airport on public transportation rather than pay for a taxi, and would gladly sweep the remains of a hotel continental breakfast into her purse rather than pay for lunch, it was an affront.
Months later, after she had died, a certificate came in the mail, noting the map coordinates where her ashes had been strewn. I put it in the box with photos, letters, and other important papers. Recently I came across it again, this time checking the longitude and latitude on Google maps. Luray, Virginia, it said, 150 miles from the bay. I checked the name of the business as well. Google had never heard of it. Maybe my mom was right – it was a scam after all.
Years passed. One day, apropos of nothing, I started to wonder – what happened to the ashes of my paternal grandparents, my grandfather who had passed away in 1986, some four years before my dad, and my grandmother who died at age 106 in 2003, the year before my mother?Maybe I knew once but had forgotten?
I called my sister who had been a much more attentive visitor to my grandmother as she grew old and infirm, making multiple trips by car from her home in the Twin Cities to my grandmother’s successively smaller residences in Milwaukee. She couldn’t remember either, but she knew which funeral home had taken care of the arrangements, and would call them.
Minutes later, she called back. “They’re there,” she reported. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I mean, there are two boxes of unclaimed ashes at the funeral home, marked Dr. and Mrs. Abraham B. Schwartz. Usually when ashes are unclaimed, they bury them in an unmarked grave on All Saints Day. But since we’re Jewish, they thought that might be inappropriate. So they’re still there.”
“And damn it,” she continued, “I was just in Milwaukee last week. I could have picked them up then.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I reassured her. “If they’ve been on the shelf for 32 years, I’m guessing that they can hold onto them a little longer.”
I suppose we could have told the funeral home to inter my grandparents with the God-fearing Christians at the next available opportunity or simply to dump them in the trash. But it felt like a decision that wasn’t entirely mine to make. It also promised to provide a moment to once again gather the family, diminished now in its ranks.
Six months later, a new plan was set in motion, to gather in Milwaukee with my sister and brother and our two cousins, the children of my father’s one brother, to do “something” with the ashes. I drove the rental car from the airport straight to the funeral home and signed for two plastic shoe boxes labeled with DYMO tape, one for my grandfather with my grandmother listed as next of kin, and one for my grandmother with my mother listed as the responsible party. Why had those boxes sat there for so long? Was my grandmother too paralyzed with grief to do anything about the mortal remains of her beloved husband of 60+ years? Could it be that they meant nothing at all to her? Was my mother too overwhelmed with the details of emptying my grandmother’s room at the assisted living facility that she forgot to pick up the ashes? It was too late for answers. Anyone who would have known was now reduced to ashes.
The next day, the five of us drove north from Milwaukee, with a funeral home branded tote bag in the trunk, to the vacation property of a family friend. It was a clear fine July day, blue skies and a cool breeze, reminding me of many other summer days spent on family vacations at a nearby lake. We parked the car and walked a half mile along a country road and then through a cornfield where on the edge, there was a small stream – no deeper than 6 inches but clear and running quickly all the same.
We stood on the little wooden bridge while we listened to a few pieces of Mozart downloaded to an Iphone. My cousins shared readings that our grandmother had selected for her own memorial service. My brother recited some verses from ee cummings and words from the Psalms that had been favorites of our grandfather. We shook the ashes, fine white dust with a few bone fragments reminding us of their origins, into the stream and watched them float away. A few shakes went into the field, where the ashes clung to the stalks of corn.
On the way back to the city, we took a detour to Kopp’s for frozen custard, one of Milwaukee’s special treats. It seemed both a fitting way to pay tribute to grandparents whose love of ice cream was legendary and hideously inappropriate to be enjoying our goodies at picnic tables next to the parking lot, rather than from a table set with delicate china bowls, linens, and silver as my grandmother always did. Throwing the napkins and plastic cups in the big trash bins, I realized that we still had the empty ash containers in the car. Imagining the hotel cleaning crew finding the boxes left in our rooms, I made the split-second decision to toss them in the picnic area bins.
I am not sure if I’ll ever go to Milwaukee again but I am glad to have been there for a sunny summer afternoon spent with my siblings and cousins. And being the pragmatic people that we all are, there was satisfaction in ticking an item off our collective to do list.
Notably, that day didn’t bring either relief or closure. But perhaps neither was needed. As it turns out, I didn’t need to scatter my grandmother’s ashes to recall how her eyes sparkled when she smiled, or her pointed questions about matters political and philosophical, or her terrible cooking. No graveyard visit was needed to recall my grandfather’s gentle manner, jaunty bowties, or that decades after leaving his childhood home of Atlanta for the Midwest, he still spoke with just the hint of a Southern accent. When I think of my dad, as I often do, it’s not a trash heap where his ashes might have ended up that comes to mind but his broad smile; his insistence on excellence; his odd habit of putting salt on a cheddar cheese sandwich; and his love of sailing, gardening, and chopping wood. And when remembering my mom, the images that resonate are of her playing the Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook on the piano; making matzo balls, roasted chicken, and new potatoes for the Passover seder; and sparing no mercy on her children when playing the board game Sorry! or rounds of Horse around our backyard basketball hoop.
I’m older now than my father ever got to be and recent deaths among family and friends have brought questions of mortality and ritual to the forefront in my mind. There’ll be no graveyard for me – throw my body out or compost it, it’s all the same to me. Remember me for my professional accomplishments, my contributions to the community, or how I treated my family and friends. And save the land for playgrounds, parks, and trails.
