Ashes to Ashes

"Easy for him to say, hard for you to do," said the funeral home director when we told him that our son had indicated a wish for his ashes to be scattered, and then tried to convince us, albeit with restraint, that an elaborate urn placed in one of the cemetery's glass cases in the new mausoleum was the way to go. My father has also said that he wants to be cremated and for his ashes to be scattered, and has been specific as to the locale. When that time comes, I will be better prepared for funeral industry resistance.

Oh, what to do with these bodies of ours when they are no longer animated by soul and spirit, by hope and sorrow? During my summer CPE at Gigantic Hospital, I observed bodies of every size, color, age, and condition, often praying over them as family members clung to each other, and sometimes praying over them in solitude because no one from the family had shown up, or because they had been unable to bear the solid certainty of loss any longer and had left the hospital swiftly and in silence. But I did not have to perform the subsequent tasks of the nurses, or make the next plans with the families.

In my own family, closed caskets have been the rule. There has been a general undercurrent of agreement to "remember them as they lived," and so I saw none of my grandparents, nor my aunt, mother, brother, or first stepmother after they died. My mother and brother were buried while I was still in the hospital recovering from the car accident; I'm not sure that I even knew of their deaths before they were in the ground. Only with my last stepmother, and only because I was holding her hand when she died, was I able to spend time in her presence afterward, absorbing her transition to someplace unknown to us.

In none of these situations did I have to make any decisions about what came next. At the hospital, people took their heartbreak and their mourning out the door with them. In my family of origin, my father has usually been the one to direct the events of the week after a death, and has countenanced little in the way of participation of others. Only with my grandmother, to whom I was especially close and who died a couple of years ago, was I able to insist upon something of my own vision of a memorial service, none of which applied to the care or disposition of her body.

I have tried to do things differently. Following the magnificent guidance provided by the wife of one of my patients this past summer, who with gentle authority and great love gathered her family of siblings and adult children and spouses for major decisions and for the final difficult hours of her husband's life, I brought three generations of us together to plan our son's memorial service, and ensured that the Quiet Husband and I involved our children in every decision about our son's remains. We were also graced by the presence of many friends who had recent stories to share over the kitchen table about bodies, funeral homes, cremations, cemeteries, and the scattering of ashes -- all in gentle, generous, and sometimes humorous conversations in which everyone seemed to intuit the wisdom that we each have different needs and expectations and desires with respect to what finally happens to the bodies of those we love.

To give the funeral home director his due, I believe that he was more interested in protecting us than in selling urns when he told us that scattering ashes would be difficult to do. (A few weeks later he was most helpful in answering all the related questions about practical issues.) Many people in our death-resistant culture accept the handling of its processes by the experts, believing that it may be easier to force its tangibility out of their minds than to acknowledge it for what it is. And while I personally am not so inclined, preferring always to see and hear and touch for myself, who can blame them? The confrontation with the physicality of death, with its insistence on the completeness and finality of the breach it creates, is difficult. But it is also the reality.

And so last week I waded into the Pacific, off a coast which our son had never reached in his short lifetime of great adventures, and scattered some of his ashes onto the gentle swells of water. It was in the end not so hard to do, for, in the words of Isak Dineson that one of of my friends used to share with us, "The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea."

As it turns out, she was not entirely accurate. There are some things for which there is no cure. But for those, the ocean offers its embrace and, sometimes, the sparkle of sunlight across its surface.