War of the Ashes
“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
When most people talk about New Year’s resolutions, I don’t believe it’s common to vow, “This year I want to get all the ashes out of our house!” And by ashes, yes, I do mean human remains. Common or not, as 2021 came to an anticlimactic close, this was my declaration to my husband, to which he heartily agreed.
The fact that I have the ashes of two people hidden in different parts of my house leads me to believe that it may be the source of more than a little bad juju. To quote Michael Scott, “I’m not superstitious. But I am a little stitious.”
How have I come to have two sets of ashes in my house, you may ask? Or how can someone who holds to orthodox Christian doctrine entertain witchcraft? The answer to the first question will take a little time. The answer to the second is that I don’t. I mean, I was joking—sort of. I think.
While I have attended the funerals of many people who have chosen burial and cremation, I have never been part of the scattering of ashes or known what that might entail. I know that you are supposed to get permission to spread human remains. However, when my Auntie Bev’s long-time boyfriend, Mike, passed away, my dad took her to a small creek in a park by her house, said a few kind words, and proceeded to scatter Mike in the stream. Being my dad, he did not get permission and was, therefore, trying to keep a low profile. Everything was going as well as possible with my aunt, a seventy-year-old with a mental disability, quietly weeping beside him when some ducks arrived thinking bread crumbs were being scattered. Chaos ensued as my aunt frantically yelled for them to leave the ashes alone, my dad swore loudly and tried to drag Auntie Bev away from the carnage. I wasn’t there but my dad, with his dark Irish humor, enjoyed regaling us with the story.
As circumstance and irony would have it, (see how I didn’t use the word “luck” there? I’m fighting the superstition that is knocking at the door of reason) the two sets of ashes in my home happen to be those of my father and his sister. It was my oldest daughter who, jokingly, suggested that we avoid keeping their ashes anywhere near each other as they were known to have explosive fights in life. She was only joking, but, regardless, the ashes are hidden in spots that are about as far away as they can get in my house.
The ashes of my dad and Auntie Bev have been in my possession for six and four years, respectively, and the longer I have waited to set them free, the harder it has been to know what to do with them. My family went on a trip to Ireland three years ago, and it seemed a perfect place, at least for my dad, to be released. He was half Irish, and it had been an unfulfilled dream of his to float down the River Shannon. But when it came to it, the thought of managing the logistics of international travel with my dad’s ashes was utterly daunting. Also, the fact that my brothers would not be in attendance made me keep dad tucked up safe in the hall cabinet. And my aunt? Well her life was hard and mostly limited to traipsing (her word) over the same seedy blocks of Vancouver’s eastside. Should I scatter her ashes in a bingo parlor? Ultimately, for both of these characters, I haven’t known what was appropriate so I have done nothing.
Now we have arrived at the point. The choice to do nothing is actually, very much, something. It seems like there has been a light shining on the areas of my life where I have chosen to do nothing. And let me share something with you: doing nothing is really hard. That is the myth of doing nothing. It sounds easier and, therefore, more fun. But the truth is that if you know there is a job to do, whether cleaning the bathroom, walking the dog, or making concrete plans to scatter the ashes, it is always easier to do the thing. Because the truth is, doing nothing has a cost.
Not doing the things we know we are supposed to do ends up eating away at us and leaving us a little bit less of ourselves. I am not talking about living your life under a looming sense of guilt and burden of shoulds and shouldn’ts. I am talking about the good things, the right things, the healthy things that are niggling at you to be done. I promise you from the bottom of my heart that I do not believe that there is anything actually spooky linked to the ashes in my house. But I know that the fact that they are still here speaks a lot to how slowly and gradually I have processed my grief. It says that I am not attending to the proper care and keeping of my soul. For too long I have been just sitting with the pain of the loss and not giving myself the permission to let go of all the complicated emotions I have held for both my dad and my aunt; two very wild characters who have been taking up a lot of real estate in other writings. I’m not a complete nutcase, I don’t think the ashes are actually speaking to me. But their presence is, oddly enough, allowing me to hear old voices that I really need to put to rest.
Now that I have confessed the morbid details of my closets, I’m sure that none of you will want to visit until I have posted an article chronicling the impending spreading of the ashes. But before I head off to finalize the plans and get the appropriate permission (maybe), let me encourage you to shed some of the weight of doing nothing. Of keeping some other ashes in your closets that really need to be discarded. I could provide a laundry list of possible examples but I am guessing you already have some little old pesky “friends” that are popping up in your mind’s eye. From unprocessed griefs to simple projects that we want to complete to a thank you card that needs to be written. Oops, I gave the laundry list.
I will confess to you that when I sat down to begin writing about the morbid fact that I have two sets of ashes hiding in my house, I thought of it as more of a confession. Like somehow, I would feel lighter knowing that you know and would still, in some way, be my friend. But as I began to open up my creepy closets full of former skeletons, I discovered something even better. I discovered a sense of hope that things don’t have to remain as they are. I am not condemned to doing nothing. I do not have to be kept in this purgatory of unempowered impotence. I can do something and that something will lead to other somethings. It is time to let go of the things that really have no business weighing me down. It is the year of getting rid of the ashes. And until then, please don’t be afraid to come to my house.
