"ASHES TO ASHES..."
William A. Wisdom

The saga of what the undertaker called "the cremains" unfolds in two distinct stages. Among my mother's last requests was that her body be cremated when she died. My father fulfilled this wish.

I

The ashes were rather unceremoniously handed over to him in a cardboard carton somewhat smaller than a shoebox. Unsure of what to do with them, he put them on the shelf in the dining room closet to await final disposition. Some time went by, and he still had no plans for the cremains.

Meanwhile, he undertook an extended trip to Baton Rouge to visit his sister. He and the cremains were both gone--together, I assumed. Some months later he returned, and immediately checked the shelf in the closet. Nothing! I told him that they had not been there since he left for Louisiana.

Getting somewhat vague and forgetful in those years, he assumed that he must have taken the cremains with him on his trip and left them at his sister's place. A phone call ruled that out. So he feared that he must have left them at one of the motels at which he'd stayed on the drive down or back. Fortunately, he had kept all of those receipts; so he called all of them. No cremains had been left behind.

I proposed that he might have hidden them somewhere in the house for safe keeping. He had no recollection of having done any such thing, and so was entirely skeptical about my hypothesis. But I was convinced that I had to be right. But where should I look? There were literally hundreds of places in his modest-sized house where a shoebox could be hidden. Should I start on the third floor and work my way to the basement, or start at the bottom and work my way up? For no good reason, I decided on the latter approach.

Talk about your lucky guess! Within an hour I had located the cremains in a big paint locker behind six or eight good-sized cans of house paint. He had been right: a thief bent on stealing what was left of my mother would never have found her there.

This anxiety-provoking adventure convinced my father that the cremains needed a more proper and permanent home. That leads to stage two of the story.

II

For reasons I never understood, he was dead-set against scattering the ashes in some place special to the two of them. No; whatever was done with them, they had to be preserved intact for all eternity--or as much of eternity as we could guarantee.

Here is the plan he eventually settled on. Some years earlier, my twin brother and only sibling had been buried in a lovely little country churchyard in a town where the Philadelphia suburbs meet the surrounding farmland. My father got permission from the church to bury my mother's last remains above my brother's, in the same plot...which, after all, belonged to him.

So late one cold afternoon, my father, my brother's widow, and I met at my brother's grave site with shovels, and a cardboard box sealed in several layers of plastic wrap to prevent deterioration. (Go figure!) We began to dig. We surely made a strange-looking trio, but none of us stranger than my father, who did most of the digging in his long, dark overcoat.

I noticed a youngster with his bicycle standing and watching us from just behind a corner of the church some hundred yards away. The next time I saw him he had moved behind a big tree about fifty yards away. Still we dug and dug at my brother's grave. As we reached what my father regarded as the right size hole, he spotted the onlooker just about twenty yards away, still gawking in disbelief. My father swung around, faced him directly, and boomed out: "Go away, little boy! This has nothing to do with you!!"

I don't think I've ever seen a kid move so fast. I wonder whether his parents and friends ever believed his story of the three grave-robbers behind the Lutheran church.

Copyright © 2006, William A. Wisdom