We Brought My Mom’s Ashes Home Last Week and I Still Don’t Know How to Feel About It

I’m not sure if this is a rant, a lament, or a drunken ramble

A quick glance at the bottle of Wild Turkey beside my laptop tells me that I may be a little drunk as I type this; normally that’s not the ideal state to be in when writing unless your name is Hemingway, but in this case it is completely unavoidable. I may ultimately delete it when I’m done, unless it reaches the 700-word mark. I publish everything 700 words or more, and the still-sober part of my brain is warning me to stop at 695 or risk being seen as a terrible son.

That risk exists because, as you know if you read my recent story on the musical legacy she left me, my mom died on the 19th of this month. She was 83 and had run a better race than I ever will, remaining in good health physically and mentally until a severe case of pneumonia changed all that exactly one year ago. It’s a risk because, like Antony with Caesar, I come today not to praise her but to bury her. Except that I can’t do that, and therein lies my problem.

We have some longstanding family traditions when it comes to death. For one, we joke about it the whole time we’re alive, which really doesn’t make it any easier when it finally happens, but tradition is tradition. Another tradition is a three-day drunken wake leading up to the morning of the funeral during which we swap funny stories about the deceased. And the surviving immediate family must — must — be the first to throw dirt onto the casket after it is lowered into the ground.

Mom threw a monkey wrench into those last two traditions, declaring that she was to be cremated with neither a funeral nor a memorial service of any kind. My stepdad wants the same thing for himself, which would have made any other plans on my part difficult. The fact that she put it on page one of her Will made any other plans on my part impossible.

My youngest daughter was the first to verbalize what all of us except my stepdad were thinking when she texted me this:

“Funerals aren’t for the dead; why aren't we doing anything? I respect grandma’s commitment to ‘not being a bother’ even in death, but seriously?”

The kid clearly got all the wisdom in the family. When I asked her in 2015 (when she was still a teenager) whether she thought it was crazy for me to open a bookstore, she said it was not as crazy as talking about it my whole life and never doing it.

And yes, we can still all get together at some point and have a night of whiskey and stories, but there is a time and a season for everything, and that time and season was right before a collective goodbye that never happened. What happened instead was that I drove my stepdad the 20 minutes to the nearest town big enough to have a funeral home (it’s East Texas, after all) where we picked up a cedar box that looks a lot like it should have jewelry in it but instead houses what remains of my mother’s physical body.

Let me rabbit trail here for a moment for a mini-rant. At the funeral home, I called (and will continue to call) them her ashes. I was quickly informed that the “correct” term is “cremains,” and it was only the funeral home lady’s sweet and caring demeanor that kept me from losing my shit right then and there. Given the world we live in today, I suppose I should just be happy that they didn’t express their condolences that she was now “unalive,” but I still think cremains is a stupid word.

Anyway, we took the box/urn back to the house where I was just able to finish saying the Catholic prayer for the dead before it was centered on the mantle above the fireplace, right next to an eerily similar box containing the ashes of her favorite dog. Then my stepdad and I wandered aimlessly around the living room in complete silence for a while, because what do you say when you just put your wife/mom on the mantle?

I wandered silently, but my mind was asking questions at a breakneck pace. Questions like will the constant presence of her earthly remains become just another decoration we stop noticing or will they keep my stepfather from moving forward with a semi-normal life at 86 years old? Like when did we decide that while keeping a coffin with a body in the living room is morbid and wrong but a small box with the cinders of that body on the mantle above the fireplace is totally acceptable? Like why the hell did she deny her family and friends the opportunity to have that totally inadequate moment of closure funerals offer? And for the record, closure is another stupid word.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not opposed to cremation, though I intend to go into the cold, cold ground like all of my other ancestors before me, ideally in a Trappist casket (with a statue of myself on a horse, holding a sword, and the phrase “tramps like us” marking the spot). And while I’m not crazy about her ashes being on the mantle staring at me every time I’m there (which is a lot; as I said, my stepdad is 86 years old), that’s what she wanted. It’s the no funeral thing that bothers me; I wouldn’t miss her any less if we’d had one (nothing was going to make me miss her less), but it would have been nice if we could have all mourned her together. And the church would have been packed; the only way you’d get as many people to my funeral is if everyone brought a date and there was free beer.

I’ll get over it, of course. I’m having Requiem Masses said for her all over the country (mainly by Franciscan priests; I don’t trust the Jesuits). I’m drinking a toast to her even now (I better wrap this up while I can still see the keyboard). And I am playing Bruce Springsteen’s ode to his late friend Terry Macgovern on repeat, because it fits more than any other song I can think of. In his prophetic wisdom, Bruce wrote the song in such a way that I can substitute “mother” every time he says “brother” and it works perfectly. Seriously, give it a listen:

All of these things, along with time, will make how I’m feeling right now fade. But I still wish she had let us keep those few longtime family traditions. Maybe that’s selfish, but we have so few of them left.

That last paragraph brought this rambling piece to over 1,000 words, so there’s no going back. I could wait until tomorrow to publish it (following the Hemingway maxim of “write drunk, edit sober”), but we all know I’m not going to. I’m even leaving the comments enabled so you can share any thoughts you have on the matter; I’d love to hear them, because after all this I still don’t really know what to think about the whole damn thing.