All the Ashes

On the morning of Sunday, March 3rd, 2024, I was sitting at home, idly procrastinating rather than doing chores in the yard, when I got a Facetime group call from my sister Jan, including my other sister Sharon and brother Pete. We often have group calls to catch up on family business and to discuss the care of our father Paul, who at 91 had been ailing for some time and at the moment was in the hospital on the mend from a double bout of flu and COVID. 

I answered the call to see my sisters both on already, and crying. “Daddy died,” sobbed Jan, then covered her face with her hands. My sister Sharon had her eyes squeezed shut, crying along with her.

“Oh shit,” I said, sitting down on a couch, taking off my glasses as my own tears came, so fast, my throat constricted. I looked back at my sisters, blurry with watery eyes and without glasses, my mind unwilling to accept what I was seeing. I’d been rehearsing how this moment could go, would go, for years. I was always expecting a phone call, expecting to hear some version of this news, but somehow hadn’t prepared myself for seeing it. This is how death travels to you now. Staring at your family’s tiny faces on a screen.

We all mumbled about the circumstances, what our father had been going through, that this was always a possibility anytime considering his heart and breathing problems, let alone being sick and in the hospital. He’d Facetimed me and Sharon late the previous night and seemed in good spirits and breath even though a little disoriented, as old folks often are during hospital stays. 

My brother doesn’t use an iPhone, so he has to hunt down his iPad whenever we do the group Facetimes. He hadn’t yet joined our group call to hear the news, so I said I’d call him directly myself. He picked up just as he joined the Facetime on his iPad, so I heard Jan tell him our father was dead. “Oh god! Oh no! Oh god!” he howled, his wife Sue in the background saying his name, trying to find out what was wrong. I burst into a new round of crying from hearing him, and I had to hang up.

I called my wife Lisa into the room, closed the door, and told her. Me telling someone else made it real, made me realize up to that point a part of me was frantically struggling to pretend this wasn’t happening, like a pinned insect. But now that part of me was still.

I like to think I am by turns expressive or controlled emotionally, depending on the circumstances. I’m not naturally a crier. But now I cried, or worse teetered painfully on the edge of not crying and crying. I was numb and leaden and then suddenly swamped by swells of grief, leaving me reduced to a new level of exhaustion and unfeeling each time, but then reviving to feel the grief again sharply when the next wave came. 

I forced myself to make arrangements to meet my siblings in Chattanooga where Jan lived, and where my father and mother had lived under her watch for the past eight years. My mother Carolynn had passed away four years ago, so now they were both gone.

I booked a flight leaving in a few hours. I threw myself into pointless housework to make it easier for my wife and kids while I was away. I couldn’t not be doing something, because every time I had a moment of inactivity, of idleness, I felt ready to lean nervelessly on a wall and slide to the floor.

My experience of writing is, I gather details. I collect and hoard them. I pay attention to things, to process, to small action, and work through ways to slow down time to expand or compress it later, or earlier, or now. I do something similar with thoughts and emotions when I write people as characters, and the obsessive and possibly negative side effect of this compulsion is I do the same with myself. I audition personalities and mental states and emotions internally, and when I feel something as myself, for myself, I often can’t help but split my consciousness to observe my own self, as material.

Then I wonder, am I really, genuinely feeling something, or am I feeling this way to imagine myself feeling this way? Am I performing emotion for the audience of my inner eye? Was I performing grief at my father’s death so I could write about it later, so I could write about it now? Am I trying on sorrow, bitterness, loss, disappointment, remorse, like costumes? Here is my anger hat. This is my grief suit.

But even as I observed my own reaction to my father’s death, it all felt real. The grief was too real in fact, a pitiless focus that I alternately ignored and cringed away from when it caught me like a spotlight. My wife dropped me off at the airport in White Plains for a flight to Atlanta and then to Chattanooga. I dreaded the act of sitting for so long without physical distraction, so I cued up the dumbest possible movie to watch. It worked, a little bit. But anytime my attention was drawn to the real world around me, there was danger. I kept it together when the flight attendant asked if I wanted a drink, but as she handed me the soda I had to turn my face to the bulkhead to stifle a sob.

I made it to Chattanooga and it was at the car rental counter when I had the first of many service interactions with innocent strangers who unknowingly trod on my grief. “Doing anything fun in Chattanooga while you’re here?” asked the friendly lady at Hertz. I kept my face blank. It was so tempting to unload, to let her know exactly why I’m here, make her feel bad in a fraction of how I feel, and wallow in the sympathy she’d feel obligated to provide. 

But what had she done to deserve that? What value would such cheap sympathy from a stranger really have for me? And ultimately, beyond this fleeting awkward interaction, why should she care? She didn’t know my dad, and she never would.

“No,” I said woodenly. “Just family stuff.”

I drove out to my sister’s house, set on a hill by the Tennessee River south of town. It’s a long ride down a narrow river canyon road, uphill looming and downhill menacing, both steep. You have to go slow to make all the winding turns and switchbacks, watching out for very occasional cars, or less occasional wildlife. There are not many houses. Some families go back several generations and claim hundreds of acres of mountain, riverfront, or both.

It’s dark by the time I got to Jan’s, where my other sister Sharon, her wife Missy, and my brother Pete are already waiting, along with Jan’s husband John. We hugged and sat down together, all wrung out and exhausted, red-eyed and talking low about which of our father’s many ailments finally did him in. COVID would eventually be listed on his death certificate, but only as the fourth of four contributing causes.

Our mother passed with all of us there in the hospital with her, which was not worse or better I guess, but different. None of us were with Dad when he died, but we were told it was quick and in his sleep. That doesn’t feel better but it could certainly be worse.

Jan, the local child and with a long career in healthcare, had long shouldered the majority of the load when it came to caring for our parents. My sister Sharon lives in Virginia, but she’s retired and has only occasional kids in the house. So she has spent many weeks and months here over the years, staying with my parents when they were at their most debilitated, or working around Jan and John’s house when she can. My brother Pete lives relatively close in Birmingham and has put in the time as well, moreso as his kids have gotten older. I live furthest away in New York and have the youngest children, so I’ve been around to help the least, which I will never stop feeling guilty about despite all the rational reasons for it.

Jan already had a running list of all the many logistical tasks that sprout up when somebody dies. Accounts and appointments to cancel. Agencies and authorities to notify. Getting Dad transferred to the funeral home for cremation. Setting up movers to take things to storage, deciding who wants what of the family heirlooms and other memorabilia, what should just be hauled away to junk. Financials that require the one last entry. “He died,” I heard Jan say over and over to people on the phone, explaining why our father would no longer require their services.

I managed to eat some pasta, and then we dispersed for the night. One of the neighbors rents a little house just a few doors down, so Sharon, Missy, and Pete stayed there. I got a room at the Holiday Inn downtown like I’ve always done because it’s about midway between Jan’s house and Dad’s place at the assisted living facility. It occurred to me too late that being near Dad’s place didn’t matter anymore, because it wasn’t his place anymore.

I spent a sleepless night tossing and turning, brain buzzing and replaying moments old and recent, thinking ahead to moments that will never happen, now. The call from my dad last night, talking to me and Sharon about trivialities, hoping to get out of the hospital soon, get back on his physical therapy routine. My dad had been using a walker around his apartment or for short distances, but he needed a wheelchair to go out to eat or often just to get around the building where he lived. I remembered how he ended that last call with, “Well, I’m going to run along now.”

After my mother died, Dad would still occasionally talk about how he’d like to come visit us up in New York, see the house out in the suburbs. Me knowing it could never happen due to his health, thinking he knew it too, both of us treating it as a kind of wish. 

Early next morning in Chattanooga, I made my way to the same funeral home that handled my mother’s cremation, to meet my siblings and family and make arrangements for our father. It’s a nice enough place, set in one of the sprawling Chattanooga exurbs consumed with bustling strip malls and office parks. The furniture and decor are formal without being stuffy, somewhere between a hotel conference center and church basement rec room. The staff wear suits in subdued blacks and grays, but we were all in jeans and t-shirts and the like, as were the few other mourners we saw milling around.

I excused myself to the restroom where I was stabbed by another startling lance of unexpected grief prompted by, of all things, a giant absurd painting of an owl tacked up by the sinks. I was transfixed by its hugely staring eyes for a full thirty seconds before I could shake it off and return to the family.

Then there were forms and questions to be answered about cremation receptacles, and budgets for outrageously expensive obituary notices in local newspapers. When I wasn’t required to contribute answers, which was most of the time, I focused on mundane details like I always do. The funeral home put out bowls of little tissue packets, branded in gold lettering with their logo. What a choice that was, to brand those packets. Same with the branded pens we used to sign all the forms and documents, which were thick chunky black rubber-gripped Uniballs, satisfying to hold. They didn’t brand the miniature water bottles though, store-bought and labeled with a grinning cartoon alpaca declaring “Alpaca Your Lunch!” in big letters.

We’re escorted into a viewing room to see our father’s body for the last time. He’s laid out in a casket with a black and gold honeycomb blanket pulled up to his chest. I fixated on this, thinking it’s no kind of color or pattern he’d ever wear. I looked at his face. It was definitely Dad. His hair was combed, his skin looked good, he seemed asleep, the formidable jaw we all inherited clamped shut, though maybe his eyes looked too tight, which I didn’t want to think about why. He was immobile, inanimate, but this was obviously Dad and we were all crying quietly and embracing. Some of us stepped forward, touched his forehead, his cheek, his hair. I couldn’t bring myself to do that, but I clasped his shoulder. I didn’t want to feel him cold, but he didn’t. He felt solid. He felt real, like Dad.

Afterwards, Dad went off to be cremated, and we went back to his apartment. He lived with Mom for the last few years at an assisted living facility we’ve all come to despise. Or rather, we despised the people who ran the place, or who run the place currently, the latest in a series of operators who are benignly incompetent at best, maliciously predatory at worst. There were always a few people we liked, staff who treated our parents with compassion and respect, but they were rarely in charge.

We prioritized gathering up small things, records, art, portable items of real or sentimental value to keep them safe. Some time before, a rash of thefts by a few bad apples on staff motivated us to install a couple Canary video cameras in the apartment, with our parents’ consent. The cameras also helped us check on our parents’ presence and wellbeing, and see who was in the apartment with them for whatever reason. 

Since the cameras are activated by motion or sound, there were hundreds of clips on the server, the vast majority just Dad moving to and from his easy chair or the kitchen table. Some we had bookmarked to archive from when Mom was alive and we saw her have a fall or some other situation we needed to document. Over the next few days, we debated how, or if, to preserve these videos. I started to look through them and immediately couldn’t, just seeing my dad go about his day, the ordinariness of it. My brother Pete and sister Sharon began sifting and saving a few, but eventually the thirty-day file retention window ended, and all the videos disappeared.

After those thefts, we also added a lock to one drawer of a dresser in our parents’ den so they could secure their wallet and billfold. Not only did they rarely bother to lock anything up, they kept it locked with their wallet and billfold left out for anyone to grab, and then they lost the key too. The contents of the locked drawer had been a mystery for years.

I became obsessed with getting the drawer open while we were all there together, in the unlikely event it held something important. We didn’t want to break the lock and damage the dresser, itself an old and nice-looking piece from a Ranch Oak set. So I called a locksmith 800 number, and they connected me to a local guy who seemed very friendly but also talked without pause and had a sort of Easy Rider grizzled unplaceable accent, though his English was as good as anyone’s. I described what we needed, and he declared, “I’m the man for the mission.”

The locksmith showed up in a full suit of black motorcycle leathers and incongruous but comfortable-looking non-motorcycle-boot shoes, something between a sneaker and a loafer. He also wore an enormous black straw cowboy hat and slim safety glasses. He was bright-eyed and stubbly, offering a fist bump with a red work glove. He gave his name as Zax the Ignition Whisperer, since he mostly fixed vehicle ignitions. As he spread out his tools to work on the drawer, he told a long story about a tricky ultra-secure lock at a doctor’s office that he opened in short order despite it being pick-resistant and tamper-proof. When I asked him how he did it, he shrugged and said, “I whispered it.”

Zax got our drawer open in fifteen minutes. Inside were some miscellaneous old papers and receipts, along with the original lock to my parents’ antique Japanese iroko-wood chest that we thought long gone. A lock inside a lock. Zax took his leave after offering condolences about our father. I noticed him admiring an elephant-head cane Dad had never used, so I gave it to him. Zax beamed, saying it was the best tip he’d ever gotten. The chest is now at my house, its lock intact and key stowed safely away.

Back at my hotel for the night, I looked online to see if our father’s obituary had been posted by the funeral home. It had, but there were other versions online too. The obituary had been scraped and rewritten by AI for reposting on BNN, a spam site plastered with the worst and most garish ads imaginable. The syndicated obituaries used the same text as the real obituary, just larded with superlative adjectives to exaggerate Dad’s war record, his work and personal history, all the other details magnified to grandiose heights. Not long after this, the whole BNN network of AI chum was effectively run off the internet when Google delisted them from search. Small consolation.

The next day we met at Dad’s apartment for final packing. While movers wrapped furniture and boxes, we piled the rest of everything in the hallway: trash to the left, giveaways to the right. A few elderly residents shuffled by and offered regards as they picked over seating pads, oxygen tubing, a disused walker. I was struck by how quickly all the physical reminders of one’s existence could be gathered up, handed off, dealt away and distributed and vanished. 

I walked out of Dad’s apartment for the last time, the rooms now emptied and anonymous, just patterns of hook-holes in the sheetrock, dents in the carpet from furniture hauled off, ghost shadows on the wall where a bookshelf leaned or a recliner bumped. Anyone could have lived there, will live there, won’t ever live there again or anywhere. 

I followed my sister Sharon and brother-in-law John down the long hallway to the stairs, glanced back and said “Bye Dad” under my breath, then stumbled with a spasm of grief for the first time in a few hours, surprising once again with its speed and force. But it passed away, and after a gasp and sigh, I walked outside. 

We held Dad’s memorial gathering at Jan’s house two weeks later, an informal “celebration of life” in modern grieving parlance. The day started out cloudy, but at noon the clouds broke into gorgeous sunlight, warm and mild, a humid touch of spring coming around the bend. We had a little food and drink, and people took turns telling stories about Dad. Family, friends, even some who worked with Dad at the assisted living place all spoke up, and I heard things about him I’d never heard before. Stories of his generosity, his attentiveness, his loyalty and consideration and thoughtfulness and gruff humor. That’s kind of marvelous, to discover a completely new part of someone you thought you knew as well as anybody in your entire life. But really, everyone you know has so much life you’ll never know about.

Before all that though, the four siblings hiked down the hill to the dock on the river, carrying our mother’s ashes that Jan had been saving since the end of 2019, and our father’s ashes, new. I remember driving my parents out to dinner when they were both having trouble getting around, but my mom was still mostly lucid, if hard of hearing. I mentioned that Jan told me they both wanted to be cremated and scattered in the river together. “Yes, that’s what we want,” Mom said. Then she added, saucily, “Does that shock you?” I acted comically flustered because I knew it would amuse her.

We had a large and beautiful Indonesian rosewood urn crafted by Jan’s son-in-law, a talented woodworker and carpenter. That’s where Mom had rested until now. Dad’s ashes filled up a big plastic bag provided by the crematorium. Looking in the urn and at the bag, both our parents’ ashes seemed the same, light gray and granular with larger bits here and there, some white and black, sandy but not like sand. They’re both heavy.

We poured Dad’s ashes from the plastic bag into the urn along with Mom’s, and between the two of them our parents filled it to overflowing. Jan said all the ashes should be mixed, bringing our parents fully together here at the end. She reached in and churned the ashes, kneading and grasping, gray dust of our parents up past her wrists. “There’s definitely more than just ash in here,” she said as she worked, grimly funny, macabre enough to make me chuckle even as I swallowed back yet another small sob, proving to myself for the millionth time that Jan is much tougher than I’ll ever be.

To cast our parents in the river, we had a little floatation urn, supposedly compostable and biodegradable, something like two large paper dinner plates with a painted calla lily flower on the top. You fill the bottom plate with ashes, arrange the top like a plate cover you get from hotel room service, and seal the two halves together with glue and fasteners which hardly seem like they’ll be composting anytime soon. The floating urn was meant to hold two people’s worth of ashes but barely contained half of what we had.

We embraced, said a few final farewells to Mom and Dad. Jan whispered quietly, “We were so lucky,” and after a beat to let us all nod, added “Then Chris came.” I laughed again and felt the best kind of wounded.

The urn instructions said it might float for more than five minutes before disintegrating, but the one holding our parents sailed out into the river for twenty feet, and after barely a minute, listed and slipped under without a ripple. A dark cloud of ash was visible in the water for a moment, expanding and spreading out and turning itself into the current, then it faded into the greens and blues of the water and reflected sky.

We drove a little ways down the canyon road and released the remaining ashes into a sweet little waterfall, eventually reaching the river once again. Each sibling also took a small bag of ash to inter in a meaningful place close to home. Sharon planned to scatter hers around iris flowers taken from plants originally grown by Mom, as well as hellebores cultivated by Dad. Jan shook hers out in a river-facing bed where yet more of Mom’s irises thrived. Pete scattered his bag of ashes by a pretty Japanese maple next to his house.

Looming over my own front yard in Westchester is a huge and beautiful monster double beech tree, fifty inches or more around, certainly over a hundred years old and possibly much older. It seems part of a line of ancient beeches stretching through several yards across the neighborhood, either coincidental or planted when this area was all farmland. 

Rather than scattering my portion of my parents’ ashes, I piled them in the crook of two massive roots at the front of the beech, looking down the grassy slope to the road. My kids arranged a few rocks and pebbles to mark out the spot. The little mound of ashes settled in the earth but still hasn’t dissipated completely, weeks and months later.

It’s not an isolated resting place for my parents, but rather a secret memorial in unknowing view of everyone and everything who passes by, driving or walking or jogging or trotting along with their dogs, or kids on bikes or traipsing through the yard, or squirrels and deer and hawks and robins and foxes and chipmunks and mice and ants and bees and beetles and worms and wind and sun and rain and snow, and time, and sometimes just me, coming by, to say hi.