We have become death and grief illiterate, Sarah Chavez.
Tending to Endings (nine)
Last week, my sisters and father and my mom’s siblings gathered in Maui, which was the second place she wanted her ashes spread, the first being her garden at home near Chicago. My father said it was strategic on my mom’s part. She wanted all of us to have an excuse for another trip to Maui together. I am certain this is true—I can imagine my mom’s smile as she added this to the will, her giddiness.
I also know that Maui truly is sacred ground to my mom. Mom was very loyal to her true loves: my father for almost sixty years, Maui since their first visit in 1976, the color blue for life.
A lot happened during that trip that may be relevant for Tending to Endings. We had a second celebration of life for Maui Ohana that truly felt celebratory. People reminded us of Mom’s commitment to the children of the island and I thought a lot about legacy and about family, too, and how death reshapes relationships, deepens them.
But when I think about what might be most helpful to share, what I didn’t know ahead of time, it has to do with my mother’s remains.
Honestly, I did not expect the ashes to be much of a thing for me. I guess I thought they would be symbolic. I knew my mother was not experiencing whatever happened to her body after death. I had not given much thought to what happens to my own body after death, planning for cremation because it was affordable and would get the unpleasantness over with quickly.
And so it has been a surprise to me that after my mother died some of my most intense experiences of grief and disappointment and healing have had to do with her body.
In April when my father and I went to Nakamura mortuary, the attendant placed the cardboard box containing my mother’s ashes into my arms, and I was stopped short by the heaviness of the moment.
Grief was no stranger by then. I had been missing my mother ever since the Alzheimer’s took hold. It had been two years since I’d been able to call her to find out the name of name of a flower or to get her take on a book I was reading, or her advice on what to do next with my life. But this grief was different. It came on like the flu, so sudden and severe it made my bones and teeth hurt.
I cradled the box as we walked out to my dad’s convertible and I stood at the passenger door, not knowing where to place her. Not the trunk. The back seat? Should I belt her in?
Finally, I sat and held the box on my lap as my father drove us around the island following the shoreline my mother loved, looking out at the big blue sea, her absence resting against my womb.
I thought it was just her body. But, of course, it was my mother’s body.
The first time my father and sisters gathered to spread my mother’s ashes was four months later on what would’ve been my mom’s 80th birthday. Dad invited us to their Chicago home for hamburgers out on the terrace. After dinner, Dad brought out the cardboard box which contained the plastic container approved for air travel and a plastic bag with the remnants of my mother’s body. It was a lot of packaging to unravel.
My sister Amy asked if we should Facetime my aunt in Colorado. None of us was sure how to proceed. We wanted her to be part of things, but was it wrong to have a camera on the event? Amy shrugged and we called.
I suggested we find a hand trowel so we could till ashes into the soil, and then felt guilty for the suggestion. Was it uncouth to use a shovel? Was I just trying to avoid having to touch the ashes?
We stood in front of geraniums beneath the pear tree. We each took a turn, my sister walked around with the iPhone narrating for my aunt. I silently grew impatient with people for tossing but not tilling. My aunt suggested finding the patch of blue flowers for her scoop since blue was my mother’s favorite color. That seemed right, and I wished I’d done the same.
After we each took a turn, my dad put the box away. We went inside for dessert and my dad and my brothers-in-law talked about the World Series over beers.
When everyone had left, I asked my dad how he felt about the evening. “It was fine,” he said. “I guess I thought we would talk about your mom more than we did.”
Which was exactly how I felt, not that there was anything wrong with the process, but it had not felt all that connected to my mother.
Ash scattering is one more aspect of dying process that we tend not to talk about beyond logistics. What is often missing then is ritual or ceremony, and also the ease that comes when we are comfortable with an occasion. All of these can provide opportunities for connection. Most of us have attended a number of memorials and funerals and celebrations of life before we lose our parents. Most of us have not attended many (if any) ash scatterings or burials before we are responsible for conducting one.
Because I was not comfortable talking about what happened to my mother’s body, I was surprised by the intensity of emotion surrounding each encounter with her ashes. My mother’s body was not just a body. It was the body I had known as long as my own. It was the body that gestated and birthed and held and fed and bathed me. It was the body I eventually bathed. It was the body of my mother for 79 years. Her ashes are evidence of great loss.
Today I believe how we cared for that body at the end of my mother’s life and after she died when the hospice nurse came and we washed and and dressed her one last time and how we eventually came together around those ashes once again in Maui, all helped me and my family to mourn.
One of the things I did before the second trip to Maui was I talked to friends about their ash ceremonies. A friend of mine who recently lost her husband said she and her kids each wrote a letter to their dad and read them before scattering his ashes. This sounded helpful, like it would provide some opportunity for meaning making without being overly structured. My sisters and father agreed.
And then, when my sisters and father and I came together again in Maui, just like my mother planned, we talked about what we wanted, what we would do. It was a loose plan. My mom was not one for formalities.
The night before we discussed the pros and cons of various containers we found in the condo. My sister Sandy landed on a wedge wood blue vase made by one of my mom’s favorite artists on the island. We discussed the best way to get the ashes from the Ziploc baggies my dad used this time for travel through the narrow neck of the vase. Dad cut the corner of the bag to create a funnel and Sandy worked it like a pastry bag. She was very careful. We made jokes about how mom—who couldn’t stand cooking or any domestic chores—would never forgive us if she had to spend eternity in the grout of the kitchen tile.
In the morning, we walk to the shore before sunrise. The sky and the water are the pastel blue of a day about to open. Waves lap at our ankles. We read our love notes to my mom or recite what comes to our hearts. We laugh at my mom’s sense of humor when my aunt’s phone spontaneously begins jangling, playing “Happy,” by Pharrell Williams.
My voice cracks when it comes my turn to tell Mom, Thank you. Thank you for this father this family this life. My sisters reach around my shoulders, hold me. The sand of my mother mixes with my tears mixes with the sand of the sea. We are together, and I know, my mother has gotten her wish.
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