We are following two black-suited undertakers across the one-hundred-degree parking lot out to a windowless metal building—my dad, Charlie, Amelia, me. John is at work, our kids at school. It is the day before the memorial service. My phone is buzzing in my pocket with texts of flight arrivals and last-minute arrangements.
We are all frazzled by the heat and the events of the past week, but I almost certainly look the most haggard. The hair on my head is just starting to fill in. My T-shirt sags off my body on the surgery side. I move slowly. The next three months of chemo is scheduled to start the following week.
“Dammit,” my mom said a few weeks ago. “I can’t believe I’m going to die right when you’re in the middle of all this. It’s killing me.” One of her wry smiles.
The bulk of me is standing here in grief—in that unhinged and unpredictable way we are led toward things after a loss—but I have to admit that part of me is here for some kind of morbid test drive, death hitching a ride in my chest from my mom’s sickbed to this parking lot behind the funeral home.
In the far back corner, in the corrugated metal building: the crematorium. The Uglification of America, my mom used to say when she would see this sort of cheap metal structure going up along some rural North Carolina highway, quickly announcing itself as a Dollar General or a liquor store. Now, inside one, her body awaits its final moments.
We know they’ll have her in the hundred-dollar cardboard cremation casket we’d picked out at the funeral home. What we don’t expect is that it will look like a large white cake box.
The morticians seem uncertain about us for wanting to be here—like it’s we who are the creepy ones. Honestly, I’m not sure we want to be here either, but Charlie feels strongly that we should see this through to the end, and we have agreed to try to support each other through whatever twists and turns our mother’s death takes us.
We kept vigil at her bedside until she died. We kept her body in the house for several days after she was gone—taking turns sitting with her, watching her change and become increasingly less her.
And now.
This is the end, I think to myself.
* * *
Three days earlier we’d sat in the funeral home office with a different mortician—our next-door neighbor, Joe, a friend and the new father of a baby girl born the week my mom died—and asked about observing the cremation.
“Uh, sure, that can definitely be arranged,” Joe said. Two of his great gifts: tact and kindness.
On the glossy mahogany table in the funeral parlor was the flowered canister we’d brought from home—her stash can. “And can you put her ashes in this?” Charlie asked. “Sorry—it has kind of a strong smell. It’s where she kept her pot.”
“Oh, definitely,” said Joe, nodding without blinking. “Not a problem.”
I was actually relieved this was the container we’d shown up with. When I’d picked up my dad for the funeral home appointment, he climbed into my car holding the orange Tupperware pitcher we’d been mixing powder lemonade in since the 1970s. “Will this work?” he’d asked.
“I don’t think so, Dad,” I’d said. “Maybe something—not from the kitchen?”
When he ran back inside to get a different vessel, I’d snapped a photo of the pitcher sitting in the passenger seat and texted it to my mom’s number. “Please come back,” I’d written. “Dad wants to put you in this.”
The first of a million nonreplies.
* * *
Inside the Uglification of America, it is one hundred degrees hotter than the hundred-degree parking lot. It looks like a garage, with a large cooler and even larger oven. The oven is, it seems, preheating.
“Do you want to see the body first?” one of the undertakers asks us.
She’s been in their refrigerator for five days. There is a sheet covering her face when they lift the cake box lid. Of the whole thing, I like that part the least. The undertaker pulls it back with some fanfare, and the four of us lean forward and peer in at her.
She is no longer my mother—and that, I think, is part of what I’m supposed to understand by visiting her here in the metal box. Although I knew it already. I knew it the moment my phone rang at 3:00 a.m. and Charlie said, “I think you should come,” and I knew it when I skidded into the driveway and a startled rabbit in the grass by the gate stared back at me—unflinching, unmoved—as I slammed the car door and ran past it. I knew I was too late.
She isn’t decomposed or anything like it, but her coloring is distinctly orange and waxy now, and her face is covered in beads of condensation. Only her hair looks like her—lovely wisps of graying brown swept back from her forehead. The purple flowers we’d strewn on her the morning she died are wilted and browning like a discarded corsage. Her eyes are sewn shut—uneven stitches between her eyelashes that look like the doll dresses she helped me sew in third grade. Her mouth is sewn shut as well.
“She would definitely not like that!” I whisper to my dad. He squeezes my shoulder.
The other undertaker turns to my dad. “Do you want to press the button for the incinerator?” he asks, as though my dad is the birthday boy at a special party. He starts showing him the levers and the different dials. My dad, who is usually game for just about anything but who I can tell in this moment is going along with the undertaker’s shtick just to avoid further interaction, presses the green button.
The oven door starts to open and then lurches suddenly, and someone else’s leftover ashes plume briefly into the air like a thought bubble or a dream about how little we belong here. We all jump back, and I can almost hear my mom yelling at my dad, “Jesus Christ, Peter—what are you trying to do to me?”
When the door fully opens, they close the box and slide it in on a short conveyer belt, and the oven door clanks shut with my mom inside. There is no window. Somehow all this time I had imagined there would be a horrifying little window like on a potbelly stove. There is only a thick metal door and she is on the other side of it and we cannot enter and she will not return.
The cremation itself will take four or five more hours to complete.
“Okay, I’m good,” I say almost immediately. I’m light-headed and annoyed at whatever made me think this might be a reasonable thing to do. Outside, I need to squat down on my knees on the blacktop while my eyes adjust to the sun. My dad comes out with me and rubs my back. Charlie and Amelia stay inside a few minutes longer, but soon emerge.
Charlie is ten years younger than I am—my parents’ second wind, a reversed vasectomy. Growing up, he and I never really fought with each other, or with our dad—it wasn’t part of the architecture of our childhood—but we all fought a lot with our mom. For a long time, that was what Charlie and I had in common. Me, maybe, because I’m so much like her—impulsive, demanding, emotional. Charlie, maybe, because he is her opposite: He can be hard to connect with, and she sometimes took that personally.
“Sorry about that,” says Charlie, cry-laughing, Amelia leaning her head against him as we all walk arm-in-arm back to the car. “I don’t know if that was okay or horrible.”
“It was okay,” says my dad. “Let’s just not ever do it again.”
* * *
After the cremation the rest of the afternoon is airport runs and phone calls, and the evening is soup and beers on the back patio with music and family and friends. An old best friend pulls into the driveway on her motorcycle, driven that day from New York. Amelia’s parents are here. John’s mom and sister have both flown in from out West. They walk through the gate. The neighbors bring dessert. All through this, the oven is at work in the back of that parking lot on the other side of town.
* * *
We hold two services. The first one is at tiny St. Mary’s House, where my parents’ and my friends all sit packed in a giant circle and look at each other, crying and smiling. The kids sit on pillows on the floor and form an impromptu band with a few of their friends to help Mark get through his beautiful rendition of an Everybodyfields song—“By Your Side”—on the guitar. They play harmonica and bongos and beat the wooden floor with their hands. They are exceptionally pleased with themselves.
I’ve asked people to wear bright colors if they want because my mom loved bright clothes. Her favorite color was purple, although three days before she died she changed it to orange.
“Orange,” she kept telling my dad. “Orange is the best.”
“You want to eat an orange?” my dad would reply, always trying to feed her.
“No,” she would shake her head fiercely. “I love orange.”
Two nights before she died she had a nightmare that she was going to be abducted. She woke up agitated, restless, panicky. She couldn’t escape the dream world. Ativan didn’t work. Neither did the pain pills. “Let’s just think about orange,” my dad eventually tried. “Meditate on orange.” He rubbed her feet and talked her through every orange thought he could generate at 3:00 a.m. Finally, her breathing calmed and she slept again.
A friend tells me that this is significant: In Buddhism, orange is considered to be a highly evolved color, representing illumination (who can trust the light?!) and essence—something full of wisdom, strength, and dignity.
I love that she could go her whole life ardently loving purple, and then shift to an equally passionate affinity for orange less than a week before she died. It’s exactly like her: She had strong opinions but was never afraid to change them—to evolve or retract or alter. Her favorite way to start a sentence—“You know what your problem is?”—was closely rivaled by “You know what I was wrong about?”
After the songs, Charlie reads a poem. Friends share memories. My dad—not one for public speaking—grips my hand as we sit on the chapel’s cozy couch.
I apologize for not reading the poem she asked me to about Italy—I just can’t do it. I fail to follow Emerson’s Aunt Mary’s advice. And because I can’t stand seeing people feel unhappy, I tell silly slapstick stories that she loved to tell: the way she was a magnet for the ridiculous, the time she got stuck on an airplane toilet, the time the bumblebee flew up her nose, the time she was scooping up dog poop and it ended up in her hair, the time in San Francisco that she had gone pantie-less to the bank when I was a baby and she set me down on the floor while she filled out a form and I pulled her hippy skirt down to her ankles and wouldn’t let go. I feel her voice in my mouth.
As I’m talking, a picture of the Virgin Mary hanging behind me suddenly falls off the wall and crashes to the floor. Lots of gasps and some laughter. “Jeez, Jan,” someone says. “Give it a rest already.”
We end the service with an open-ended moment of silence. We tell people they are free to go whenever they want. Before the memorial, when we were planning this, I kept worrying that people would feel awkward or uncertain or like they needed to stay as long as others do. I wanted there to be a gong or bell at the end of the moment to let people know it was okay to go.
Charlie was clearer: “It’s about honoring the unknowing and the awkwardness and the mystery of dying,” he said. “It’s unsettling—and that’s okay.”
Oh my God, I thought. I am terrible at death. I don’t know how any of this is supposed to work at all.
* * *
It will be a couple days before we receive the ashes from the cremation because, as Joe the mortician tells me one morning in the driveway, after the incinerator, there is the cremulator—a high-speed blender of sorts that grinds the cremated bone fragments into approximately four pounds of rocky sand.
Two days after the memorial service, Joe rings the doorbell holding the stash can. He’s home from work for a quick lunch, the hearse crowding the narrow driveway between our houses. His wife, Josie, is home full-time with the baby, and Joe is trying to get back to working a regular schedule. His eyes are raw with the shock of parenting. I can hear the sound of newborn cries through our open windows at all hours.
“These are for you,” he says when I open the door, handing me the container. Four pounds.
“Thank you,” I say, holding it awkwardly with both hands, wanting to put it under my arm, but knowing that would not be right either. “I hope you guys are doing okay over there.”
“We are,” he says, smiling. “Tired—but she’s so great.”
Fifteen minutes later I peer out the dining room window. The driveway is empty. I discover I’m still holding the canister, balanced on my hip and in the crook of my arm. I’ve let the dog out and straightened the couch cushions and made a grocery list, but I haven’t put it down. Through the screens, I can hear Josie humming and cooing to the baby—that mindless meandering tune of comfort and companionship—the loveliest of music, one of the first sounds I imagine I ever heard.