My mother has charged me with transferring my father’s ashes from the cardboard box they have been sitting in for years into a proper urn. We sit together in the wood-paneled living room, littered with packing peanuts and a collection of ornamental urns and mini-urns she has bought on eBay.
“Well what do you think?” my mom asks. I tear into the vacuum-sealed plastic and pull out the bulbous metal cylinder, turning it around in my hands, admiring its texture, shingled, like an old disco ball.
On the front is an engraving of three birds, flying away. A slip of paper falls out, some Chinese letters and—this product has been inspected and sterilized for 100% customer satisfaction.
“It’s really nice.” I say.
What else can a son say to a mother?
“I’m glad that you like it. I like it too.”
Tears dam up just behind the eyes. Ready to burst and flood the dry floodplains of my mother’s cheeks. We get more delicate — not stronger — as we get older, by all the things that haven’t killed us. The silt of life’s pain that has settled on the bottom is easily stirred to the surface.
The power of “now” that Eckhart Tolle extolls — absolute horseshit.
It takes time. Things take time to clarify and settle. The decades collect down there in the hidden pools at the bottom of the world. There are little men down there with ladles, they scoop up the blood and giblets and are pouring it over some Thing, like you baste a turkey. Are they trying to bring it back to life again?
“I’ve already called up the funeral home. They said for you to just drop by at any time and they’ll transfer the ashes,” my mom says.
“I think we could actually do it without them,” I say, “Just with a coffee scoop or something, we could throw it away after…”
A look of abject horror appears on her face.
“Honey, I just don’t think that’s a good idea. I’ve already told the funeral home you’re coming.”
“You don’t trust me?” I say, feeling myself getting hot and ashamed, thinking back to the time when, in a cleaning mania, I threw away a garbage bag of all the Hallmark cards my dad had received — decades of birthdays and Christmases — and I found her ashen-faced down at the bottom of the driveway dredging them out of the garbage bin.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” mom demurs. “It’s just that… it’s best to leave these things to professionals.”
I nod, accepting the finality of her judgment.
I am a stupid fool, incapable of doing anything right.
“I’ve got a doctor’s appointment. I can depend on you to take care of that, right?” my mom says, grabbing her car keys.
“I got it, no problem.”
I watch her Subaru back down the driveway and then dash to my bedroom window to watch her pull away down the suburban street.
Alone again in the eerie house. Periodic creaks and groans coming from the attic.
I go and grab the cardboard box that holds dad’s ashes. I pause for a moment before opening it, admiring the typewritten label on the front cover.
Inside, there is a plastic baggie full of ash that looks like a smothered campfire.
A couple shards of bone are scattered throughout the dust, the belchy last remnants of a body mostly digested by flames.
I shut the box and place the velvet covered urn and mini-urns in the passenger seat of my truck.
It’s drizzling and the labyrinthine beltway that cinches around Raleigh smells like honeysuckle. Momentarily overwhelmed by all the people and friends and acquaintances I had known whom I no longer spoke to, who didn’t call or deleted my number from their phones, or whose number I lost over the years, all the friends who had slowly became not-friends, and the dad-in-the-box sitting beside me on the passenger seat, I pull over into a shaded spot in front of the funeral home listening to the rain on the windshield.
Then I remembered my urn.
Like so many of the buildings in downtown Raleigh, the Brown-Wynne Funeral Home is a squat, depressing 1970s-built brick affair, a vestige of our little Terry Sanford-period of Southern social democracy.
The funeral home’s tall brick chimney with a little sliver of smoke coming out brings to mind the camps, Bergen-Belsen, the dreaded ovens. I turn the truck off and sit there for a moment, listening to the sound of the rain on the windshield, then head inside.
An elderly woman with a perm stares as I stumble into the main entrance, almost tripping and toppling the urns onto the low-pile carpet.
“Oh! Let me help you sir.”
“My mom called and said to stop by and they could do the… transfer,” I say, pointing at the urns. She nods with the look of any employee having to do something annoying and ushers me through dark hallways, boxes of tissues strategically placed on end tables, to the funeral home’s main office, where employees mill around drinking coffee, shuffling papers at their desks, their shoes squeaking on the linoleum. The dingy, workaday mess looked like a taxi dispatch center from the 1970s.
The air in the building is stale.
The receptionist ushers me over to a corpulent, older gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair, who pulled down his spectacles as I approached.
“Can I help you?” he asks in a thick, Piedmont drawl.
I look down and notice a Jerry Falwell Sr. memorial service handout on his desk.
“Ted, this young man wants some ashes put in these urns,” she says. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to watch,” I say.
“And he’d like to watch,” she echoes, with a cough and a tone of slight judgment.
The rest of the staff stop what they’re doing and seem to be eavesdropping on this interaction, any minor drama helping to break up the monotony of the day.
“I never got a call about that.” The man says.
“Well she said she spoke to the crematory operator and he said bring it in.
“I am the crematory operator,” he says, flashing a row of buttery yellow teeth, then leans back with a sigh.
“You know what, it’s no problem. Give me a minute to get set up and then come on back.”
Minutes later, I am beckoned back into a kind of breezeway behind the office where the massive oven with a conveyor belt yawns beside a wooden workbench — it looks like the kind of wood ovens guys sweat in front of in fancy pizza restaurants, but much bigger. It smelled strange.
The cremator has changed and now looks like a character from a steampunk movie — black leather apron, goggles, and thick gloves.
I get the distinct impression that he is annoyed at having to do something so minor as transfer ashes when he’s used to burning bodies. He takes my case of urns and mini-urns and turns them over, inspecting them with an appraiser’s eye.
Then with a bit of a flourish like a waiter popping the wine bottle and pouring, Look at me doing this in the dignified way he sets to work with a funnel, carefully transferring the ash from the baggie into each of the urns with a funnel.
If I wasn’t watching, would it really matter if some fell on the ground or the workbench?
The heavy door of the oven is open, and I look at the conveyor belt and smelter—the walls are blackened and covered in gray dust. The conveyor belt that had rolled my dad and countless other people into the fires.
It almost seemed like a crime, that this man had been back here shoveling bodies into ovens for years, and worse that there were ovens all over the city and country doing the same thing, to people and animals.
Watching him do his business, he seemed like some strange character out of the shadowy mists of a Fritz Lang movie from the 20s or 30s. Standing there, I have a daydream or fantasy of my dad on the conveyor rolling into the oven and the door closing behind him, but once inside, his eyes open and he bangs on the fireproof door to get out. It is still hard for me to imagine that human beings can no longer feel pain in their bodies when they are dead.
“I think I’m done here,” the cremator beckons me over to inspect. The mini-urns are loaded — I shake them and open them, like half-empty saltshakers. The big urn has received the majority of the matter. Me and the man give each other a strange look and I thank him and cover everything in velvet and take it back out to the car.
Maybe a decade later, when I moved home for the umpteenth time, I found myself working at an alt-weekly office right around the corner from the funeral home and oven. Things weren’t going well for me, it seemed like God was laughing at me, trying to teach me a lesson about having fantasies of wholeness — I had made a big grand loop, and ended up back at square one. My office window looked out on the backyard of the rehab house next door. The half-way house residents were out in the sunshine all day, flirting, smoking, goofing off, laughing, living life, I was stuck inside and miserable. I zoned out and watched them and for a minute felt happy and free and then I would think about the funeral home and the blackened oven and the things that were going on over there.
Back at home, my mom is pleased. We place the big urn with the birds on the mantle over the fireplace, just below a painting of shrimp boats plying a salty Southern coast.
The next morning, over coffee, she asks,
“Do you want me to get you a plot beside me and your brother and your dad at the church?”
“What?”
“I have cremation plots behind the church for me and your brother beside your daddy, but I haven’t gotten one for you yet.”
“Why not?”
“I figured you might want to be buried somewhere else, if you had a wife or something.”
I run to my room and lay under the covers for a moment and cry.
Then I came out.
“Of course I want to be buried with you guys. You’re family.”
“Well… we’re getting cremated and put behind the church.”
“Could we look around for a graveyard all of us could get buried — actually buried with our bodies — in?”
“We’re getting cremated and we’re getting put there.”
“Well, let me think about it,” I said. I needed to think about it.
I sat in my childhood bedroom, little altered since high school — the big wooden computer workstation in the corner with the 311 poster and the queen-sized bed taking up the majority of the room. Crates of books and cassette tapes, band and zine and peace punk paraphernalia piled up in the corners, the things I had not brought with me when I had “moved” to DC — moved without fully committing — intuiting it would not be home but a kind of weigh station.
My mother had assured me that she didn’t need me at home anymore, that I was welcome to stay, that I was always welcome to be with them, but that I should go out and build my life. Twenty-five years old, unemployed, not depressed or suicidal but it felt like the end of the line, like my life had wrapped itself up in a neat little bow. “There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only,” North Carolina writer Thomas Wolfe wrote, “fool this is life, you’ve been nowhere.”
From my bedroom window, I could hear the dull blare of the high school marching band through the woods. How many years had it been since I went to that high school, since my friends and I loitered in the Barnes and Noble parking lot, smoking cigarettes and blasting music, like troops having snuck off base, stealing an hour back for ourselves?
That night, when my mother and brother had gone to sleep, the lights of my bedroom stayed on late, their glow visible through the trees to the little wooded cul-de-sac.
I grabbed my laptop from the desk and tentatively pecked out a title, “Instructions in the event of my sickness or untimely demise” in all caps at the top. Pressing save, the document appears on the desktop. Then I realized how absurd it was — in two or maybe three years, the laptop would be obsolete. Or it would be broken. Or it would get a virus and the file containing the instructions would be ruined.
So I grabbed a couple of sheets of notebook paper and on the first sheet, wrote in Sharpie, “Instructions for my untimely demise.”
I looked at the words on the page — Christ, it looked like a suicide note. In parenthesis under the title I wrote, “Disclaimer: this is not a suicide note.”
#1 Patrick, you’ve been a good friend to me. You can have my truck and computer and any money I have remaining. You can sell the truck and put a down payment on a house with whatever money I have. Also, weird request, but please go through my journals and diaries and black out any of the embarrassing stuff before my family or wife or kids (if I have them) or whoever can get to it, OK?
#2 Please don’t have me all drugged up. No painkillers, no hospice, no hospital stays please. Don’t keep me alive. If I’m near the end, don’t let them pump me full of morphine and “make me comfortable.” I’d rather not be all doped up and glazed over.
#3 Funeral should be a party.
#4 Buried, not cremated. I hate the idea of being burned to ash. I would rather leave something physical behind…a tombstone…a coffin, a body… physical things. What ever happened to leaving a body behind after you died?
I sighed and crumpled the piece of paper up. It was all wrong. So maudlin and goth and dramatic. I threw on my black hoodie and walked out the side door of the house. The floodlight clicked on, illuminated the leaf-covered driveway, the American flag in the front yard fluttering in the wind, staked down in a thick carpet of grass. Low clouds moved swiftly overhead, illuminated by the full moon.
I walk across town in a stupor, past the high school and the manicured lawns of banks and franchise restaurants. I am drawn, as if by hidden magnets, to a subdivision holding the old hidden graveyard. I know the place from years ago, from being a teenager when me and my friends had been crazy night creatures and ranged around the gravestones all night, hopping fences and sneaking into swimming pools and hiding and scaring each other and lighting candles and drinking 40s and lying on gravestones.
Now all these years later, I don’t think—I just move inexorably towards the strange darkened little cul-de-sac. I creep up a cracked driveway of a suburban house, past the dusty old marooned boat, covered up with vinyl, gathering leaves and squirrel nests. I feel my way out into the dark, leaf-covered woods — out there, I find the old wrought-iron gate. It’s like the portal in Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I open the creaky old gate and go in.
The leaves and pine needles abruptly give way to cut grass, nubby gravestones and crosses rising out of the mist. Why is there always mist and ozone on the graveyard when there’s no mist and ozone anywhere else, I don’t know.
It feels so good to be alive and relatively young and not dead and buried or cremated like these people and be out in the free and open night air not stuffed up in some stuffy house or office or hospital! I lie down on a big tombstone and cross my arm and pretend like I’m dead.
Now that’s a proper death, to die like an animal. An eternal mattress of moss for the flesh and bones to decompose, nibbled by other animals, skin slowly leather and mummified by weather, bones finally crumpled down into the bare dirt, left to nothing.
I sit out there in the cold until my hands start to ache.
I sleepwalk back across the suburb. The roads are all empty, the traffic lights all flashing yellow. Past the sleeping K-Mart with its great lit-up parking lot, and the ranch houses and churches, the great Coptic mall set back in the woods like a monument on the horizon, timeless and lit up like Roman ruins.
I suppose I was trying to come back to myself. It felt like my soul had gone somewhere, God had disappeared from my life, like the gauzy light of the sun when it disappears behind the clouds. I was just a pile of bones and skin — where had my insides gone? And searching for them, I did not find them. Searching across the great land, I just found land, scenery, and others, some with the holy spirit, some vacant. The roulette wheel continued to spin in darkness, like a minor daemon screaming “Where she stops nobody knows!” and that point of stopping — the point of stagnation, becoming calcified and resigned — was the essential question.
Trying not to wake my mother and brother, I opened the side door and tip-toed back into my childhood bedroom and fell into a deep sleep. No dreams.