“I don’t want to do this,” Cooper says. “But with me moving, I guess we have to do it now.”
Cooper is my youngest son, and he is here at my house to help me divide up the ashes of my oldest son, Drew. I’m lucky Cooper is here at all. He and his brother Grayson, my middle son, haven’t been talking to me that much, not since I told them I can’t be a caretaker for their mother, my ex-wife, anymore. I told them that I deserve a life, and while it’s not their mother’s fault she’s mentally ill, I can’t give up my life for hers.
So they don’t have much to do with me. Well, Grayson has nothing to do with me. Cooper is talking to me a little, maybe because he loves me, or maybe because he misses me, or maybe because he’s scared of being alone without me. I don’t know. I know I’m scared of being alone without him and Grayson. But I’ve also learned that mostly, we are alone, we just don’t always know it.
Cooper brought three urns—one for him, one for Grayson, and one for their mother.
We walk into the kitchen and open the box with the urns he’s purchased. They are rectangular, wooden, and each one has a tree of life carved into it. Sunlight reflects off of the dark wood and sparkles inside the grooves of the carved branches and leaves. Cooper looks down as he traces the curves of the carving with his index finger. His broad shoulders are slumped. He stops tracing the curves and runs his hand through his hair.
I turn one of the urns in my hand. The top is one solid piece, so I’m looking for screws in the bottom, trying to figure out how we open it. I find one screw and take it out, but the bottom doesn’t separate.
“Maybe it slides out,” he says.
I hand him the urn. He pulls at the edge, turns it and tries pulling it in another direction. The bottom isn’t moving. I pick up another urn and take out the screw in this one, try to get it open. I can feel myself getting frantic. Frantic to get this open, frantic to get this over with. It’s like the urns want to stay closed.
“How fucking hard can this be?” I say. I’m gripping the urn tight and trying not to throw it across the room.
“I got it,” he says. I look over and he’s slid the bottom open. I pull at mine harder until I am afraid I’ll break it. Finally, it releases too.
We stand there with our empty urns.
“I guess we put the ashes in a Ziplock? And then into the urns?” I say.
“I guess.”
I walk over to the drawer and grab three Ziplock bags (quart size), and a measuring cup. I turn and stop, look at the bags I’m holding. I can’t look at Cooper.
I want to tell him that since Drew died I feel like sadness has almost filled me up, that I’m just a container full of sadness that is always about to spill over. I keep a lid on it, cover it up, but it only takes a drop or two to make me overflow. I try hard not to let it splash on others.
I don’t tell him that though. Instead I hold up the bags and say, “Are these big enough?” and walk towards him.
He says, “Yeah, I mean we don’t need to put a lot in them.”
I turn over the large, plain wooden urn that holds my son’s ashes. It is the least expensive urn the funeral parlor sold. It’s light colored, no designs in it, no carved trees or delicate leaves. And it has a simple bottom—one screw on each side. I just have to remove them and then the whole bottom comes off.
I open the urn, unsure what to expect. Inside is a large plastic bag that is gathered at the opening and held closed by a plastic fastener.
Inside the bag are white ashes. I hold it out in front of me.
“I didn’t think the ashes would be so white,” he says.
The bag sways a little.
“I didn’t either.”
I don’t know what I expected the ashes to look like. I’ve never seen human ashes before.
I say, “I kind of thought they’d be darker.”
“Me too.”
I snip the tie that holds the bag closed and open it wide. I hold it open with one hand and grab the measuring cup with my other. The handle slips slightly in my sweaty hand. My son holds open a Ziplock.
“I guess I just scoop?” I say.
He shrugs. I don’t think our eyes have met the whole time he has been here.
I dip the measuring cup into the ashes. I’ve heard that sometimes everything doesn’t turn into ashes. I’ve read there can be large chunks. I fill the measuring cup and hope I don’t feel any of those pieces. I hope it’s just ashes.
“I can’t believe I’m putting Drew in a Ziplock,” I say to him.
“It’s kind of fucked up,” he says.
He holds the bag steady. I keep looking down so maybe he won’t see the tears I’m feeling fill my eyes. I take a chance and look up at him—he isn’t looking at me, but I can see his eyes look like they are filling with tears too.
I pour a few cups of ashes into the bag. I can see tiny particles of ash in the air. They float through a beam of light coming in through the window. The ashes hang there sort of—caught twinkling in the light and the still air of the room. I wonder if I’m breathing in any of them.
I pour one more scoop into the bag.
“I don’t know, is that enough? I guess that’s enough.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That looks like plenty.”
We start filling another bag. I can’t help but think—which parts of Drew am I scooping?
Am I scooping the part that cried long ago when we were fishing and kept a fish we caught—the part that cried at our taking the fish’s life? Am I scooping the part of him that as a teenager saw a homeless man and instead of ignoring him or making fun of him asked me to stop at a store and buy the man some water? What parts of him does each scoop of ash hold? Does it hold the other parts—the parts that got him off track, that kept him from finding his way in life?
I hold the measuring cup and think, maybe this scoop of ash holds the joy he felt when he still felt joy. Maybe the parts of him that made it so he couldn’t stand this life were burned away and only his beauty is left.
I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about what these scoops of ash hold. But I want them to hold parts of him, and I want to think I’m sharing these parts with his brothers. With his mother. That in sharing him he isn’t gone. I don’t want him gone, and I’m terrified people will forget him. Sometimes when I have a hard time remembering his voice I’m terrified I’m forgetting him.
I scoop some more and we finish filling the other two bags, then screw the bottoms on and seal all three bags into their urns.
We stand there for a bit and I’m not sure what to say. Why can’t I tell Cooper how much I miss him? How much I miss Grayson. I just watch as he puts the urns into their box and says he has to go. We hug, and I turn my head to the side because I feel the tears again, and I tell him I love him. At least I tell him that.
“I love you too, Dad,” he says.
And then he is gone. I think of other hugs and other “I love you’s.”
And other people leaving.
After he goes, I wander back out to the kitchen. I see that some of the ashes have spilled onto the tablecloth.
Later, on the phone, I’ll tell my partner how some of Drew’s ashes are on the tablecloth and I don’t know what to do. That I don’t know why it bothers me but it does. I’ll start crying as I tell her, and I’ll try to hide the sound, but she’ll hear it. She’ll come help brush the ashes into an envelope that I’ll seal and draw a heart onto. And for no reason I’ll be able to figure out, I’ll put the envelope on top of the refrigerator.
And for no reason I’ll be able to figure out, even though the envelope is almost empty, even though it holds only the tiniest amount of his ashes, I’ll look at it from time to time, and I’ll think of all of the parts of him those few ashes might contain.
