Sketch: Scattering of Ashes

My father's ashes sat in a cardboard box up on a shelf in his bedroom for almost a year. What do you do? Mum couldn't make up her mind where to scatter them, and it's not the kind of thing you make suggestions about, is it? So they sat up there with the old scarves, and hats, and sweaters that nobody wears anymore. Stuff that had been set aside, and forgotten.

Every once in a while Brenda would call. "What are we going to do with Dad?" she'd say. She wanted Mum to bury the ashes. Mum and Dad had actually purchased plots years ago, but for some reason Mum put off the idea of actually interring Dad. "I don't want him stuck in the ground," was all she'd say about it. "But Mom, he won't just be stuck in the ground! There'll be a service," Brenda argued. Mum would want a place where she could go and visit her husband of sixty years, Brenda told the rest of us.

When my mother-in-law Esther died, Frank snuck into Beacon Hill Park and scattered her ashes in a little grove, where he'd also purchased a plaque on a bench right beside a pleasantly burbling brook. "Esther would have liked that," he said. And to hell with the civic bylaws. Actually, he accomplished the deed in shifts, bringing pockets full of Esther to her final resting place and scattering her. It reminded me of The Great Escape, where the POWs would carry dirt from their tunnel out into the yard and spread it around right under the noses of the German guards. Frank didn't send the contraband materials rattling down his pant leg, though. He transported Esther in zip-lock bags, which he emptied ceremoniously, then carefully folded and reused.

Like Frank, Dad had served in World War II. Dad as a bomber pilot. At one point I'd wanted to write a book based loosely on Dad's life. This would have been a couple of years before his heart attack. I asked him to go with me to the Canadian Air & Space Museum in Toronto to look at a Lancaster bomber they have in their collection. But he always begged off. I thought it was his reticence about the war that held him back. Mum told me later that it wasn't reticence at all: by the time I got around to asking him, a mild dementia had set in and Dad was afraid he wouldn't be able to remember anything about the plane, or how he flew it. He didn't want to go and gawk at something that had been part of his own story and not remember a damn thing about it.

When Mum told me that, it was like she'd fastened a lead ball to my heart. I felt like an asshole.

Anyway, something had to be done with Dad's ashes...

To be continued...