At Home in the Park, 2013
(Click on image to see larger.)
In thinking about her death, my mother
was adamant that her body not be subjected to embalmment and burial. She’d hoped
her remains or some parts of them might be recycled or used for medical
research, and although every kind of paperwork imaginable was in place for such
arrangements it did not turn out to be possible for either of those wishes to
be honored. This sent us straight on to Plan C, which was cremation. Having
jumped ahead so unexpectedly to this outcome, my sister and I realized that
we’d never found out what our mother wanted done with her ashes.
It was a certainty, though, that
neither my sister nor I had any desire to keep those ashes in urns on our respective
mantels. This left us thinking about the Elizabeth River, beside which our
mother was born, and the Atlantic Ocean, close to which she lived for most of the
rest of her life.
Disposing of human ashes, or cremains, as they’re politely called in
the trade, is a far trickier matter than I’d expected. For one, you can’t just
wander down to the shore and toss them into the surf. That’s not legal, it
turns out, just as it’s not okay to do a lot of other things you could think of
that would seem appropriate and respectful.
Clearly some subterfuge was
called for, which means mainly that anything goes and that the important thing
is to not draw attention to yourself as you do it.
[How many of you are already
recalling this cautionary scene from “The Big Lebowski”?]
My sister and I finally decided
that our mother’s ashes should be scattered in the state park located at the
end of the street where we spent much of our childhood. Our mother loved to
walk there, especially in the fall and winter when the park’s thousands of
acres of tall dunes, live oaks and swampy bottoms were a refuge from the ocean
winds at the other end of our street. She’d come home cheerful and unburdened
by whatever stresses she’d carried into the park. Sometimes she’d come home
with interesting leaves or twigs or bayberries with which to replenish the dry floral
arrangement she always kept on top of the piano in the living room.
If you’ve never handled cremains,
let me tell you that they might surprise you a little. One relative warned me
that her late son’s cremains had included pieces of bone several inches long.
My mother’s ashes, fortunately, held no bones and to the uninitiated could have
passed for a bag of finely sifted flour, a little on the grayish side.
The day I distributed my mothers
ashes was sunny and chilly, just the kind of day Mother would have loved to
walk in the park. I naively thought that as I tipped the bag the ashes would be
so light as to float elegantly into the air and return to nature as little more
than a dusty cloud. But in fact they’re kind of heavy and leave a distinct
trail. So instead of tossing her ashes into the air, I took a long walk and left
her ashes atop dunes and under the low limbs of live oaks. I left some in the
empty crooks of trees, where maybe they’ll keep a few squirrels warm this
winter or give next spring’s snake nests a soft cushion. I made sure some of
them made it to White Lake and to the inland bays. I hope some of them have
drifted out into the Chesapeake Bay by now or have even made their way around
to the Atlantic Ocean.
As Moses, or whoever wrote the book of Genesis said, "Dust
thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return."
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