We Keep Our Dead

I come from Cremation People. Body burners going way back. But we’re still getting our technique down.

When Grampy died, Grammy didn’t waste a beat arranging cremation. We scattered the ashes right behind our house in the little rock garden the size of a plastic wading pool and we didn’t stand around contemplating it too long. It was one of Maine’s four actual hot days a year and our church clothes were melting onto us like polyester skin.

You won’t be surprised to know that the next time Grammy sent me out to weed, I got a little on me. I had expected the remains to be all soft, feathery, like the dark powder that lines the ashtray of a sinner who doesn’t know the body is a temple. But the ground was studded with hard bleached kernels, pebbles of death among the pansies. It was horrible but minimalist, a Zen boneyard.

This was supposed to be an improvement over the fate of Russell. Russel had been the fun uncle, fun because he was youngest and could fling pizza dough high into the air, watch the wobbly disc flip, and catch it coming down. Fun because he lived far away and never had to discipline us. He died faraway, too, 30 years old, lugged home to Maine in a carry-on by Grammy.  

Throughout my childhood, she kept Russell near in a dense golden metal box the weight of a concrete block. I suppose it was an urn, but when I learned the word in spelling, the picture was of something else, something vase-y and sleek, not heavy and square. Urns were supposed to be delicate ceramic affairs that might get knocked on a mantle in a madcap dive as the hero of a comedy tried to save it. We had no mantle, save the cardboard fireplace Grammy put up at Christmas, and if Russell’s home ever fell on you, you’d lose a digit for sure.

Russell was perched on a plant stand on the sitting porch where we ate grilled cheese sandwiches while watching the lightshow of thunderstorms or read by the woodstove as snow blinded the windows like batting.  He abided quietly over a domain of Newsweek magazines, African violets, and thousand-piece puzzles, his urn a little castle imploring, Dust me. The metal tarnished over time and we were poor enough not to have or maybe even know what you’d polish such a thing with. It didn’t seem a very nice outcome and more than once, Grammy muttered, “Prob’ly shoulda scattered him.”

 So, when Grampy died, scattered he was. By the next year, he would stop being so visibly a part of the rock garden, but in those first months, my mother and I both groused about this decision. I didn’t want to weed him and my mother hated that the rock garden was next to the old wooden picnic table where we often ate supper. You know what they say: Nothing kills a picnic like cremains.

Almost 30 years later, my mother moved from her Glade-scented senior housing apartment into assisted living. She tasked my then husband and I with emptying the place, sorting the ephemera from across the decades that cumulatively revealed her one true passion: here a bag of cat toys, there a pile of 1995 Cat Fancy magazines, and a life-sized mechanical sleeping cat with battery-operated purr.

The closet behind her easy chair was especially dense with cataphernalia, including a startling number of notebooks adorned with pretty kitty faces. Inside some were daily temperatures from across the decades. Others contained answered prayers. A few were blank, as if she’d wearied of filling them.

The tumult of that closet! Beyond the feline stationary, there were dozens of old phone books. I knew for a fact that she called fewer than 15 people in a given year, but she had old phone books from the 70’s to the 00’s piled up just feet from her chair. For what? To fuel a campfire in a coming apocalypse? For an elaborate art installation titled “People of No Interest to Me”?

And then, to my surprise, under all the faded yellow Yellow Pages, I found Russell. I lifted him carefully from among the detritus, sat him on a TV tray, and had one of those sober this-is-what-it-all-comes-to-moments. Growing up Seventh-day Adventist, I had heard it said many times that “the dead know not anything”—a slogan never more comforting than at that moment.

I decided to scatter the ashes right there in the Maine woods I had often been told that Russell loved. Trudging through the snow like a Robert Frost character, I bore Russell into a stand of birches and began the task. I held the urn away from me, trying to judge the direction of the wind, so that the ashes would swirl down on the current. But the air was still, and ashes had a mind of their own, falling out heavily, unprettily in clumps.   

And then rose petals began to flutter out of the container. They were startlingly beautiful, almost pure black and perfectly silky. Had they always been this color or had time done some alchemy? What magic had kept the petals so pristine? It took my breath away. 

This is where the Hallmark movie would end. But after the petals, there was still more Russell. Ashes seemed to pour and pour, beyond possibility. My extended arm ached and my teeth chattered and I really needed a pee. Eventually, the clown car of urns was empty.  Russell was free, returned to the earth he’d walked as a boy. I said a little prayer and headed back inside. 

Except that when I went to remove my boots, I couldn’t: they were caked with him. I knew he didn’t know, had been beyond knowing for most of my life, and yet and yet. I couldn’t just rinse away the fun Uncle, the tosser of pizza dough. Back out to the birches. I trudged about to let the snow claim him. It took a while, further reminder that the dead are not always easy. 

When it was my mother’s turn, she came home in a stiff paper bundle, no urn at all. I kept her in the house for a few months, Russell style, before I buried her in the lilacs out back, Grampy style. What I learned from the rock garden mess of my youth was to bury deep, so I dug a three-foot hole. What I learned from my first scattering was not to shake her loose. I set the entire package intact at the bottom of the opening and then filled the hole, first with soil and then with the roots of a freshly-purchased lilac tree. I had a new commandment: water thy mother.

Someday, I will die, and when I do, my daughter or perhaps a grandchild will deal with my ashes. I want them to fill a generous-sized Mason jar with me and bring me to the Back River in Maine, which I love the way Russell loved the woods. I hope they will keep the lid on tight and drop the whole thing in. The dead may or may not know anything but this much is true: the living won’t need an urn to keep me close. 

When you love someone, you always get a little on you.