From the Closet to the Grave
by Betty A. Marton
Thirty-one years after her death, we buried my mother’s ashes.
She died of pancreatic cancer at age 48 in 1975 — before hospice and support groups — when cancer was a dirty word that my father was convinced she’d be better off never hearing. He, who did the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in ink every week, was incapable of hearing or speaking the words that would describe her pain or a future with four half-grown children and without her. Although I took care of her for the final five months of her life, she and I never talked about what was happening, either. I fed her, bathed her, and gave her pain medication as if she weren’t slipping away and as if I knew how I’d survive when she was gone. I was 20 and did not know how to trespass my father, her fortress of physicians, or our collective anguish.
Almost all I remember of her funeral is the ugly green hue of the pine casket that so impossibly held her body. Then it was gone. I knew she had been cremated, but I asked no questions and moved, numbly, through the next decade of my life. After many twists and turns I got married, had beautiful babies, and missed my mother every step of the way.
Mid-way through a game of golf in 1997, my father collapsed, immobilize by a massive stroke. Although he lived for another eight years, on that hot summer day, we didn’t know if he would survive. “Do you know what his wishes are?” my cousin Renee asked after hearing the news. I knew what she meant. “He wants to be cremated, just like mother was,” I replied. Renee hesitated. “Where are her ashes?” she asked.
After my mother’s death, I went on to become a journalist, able to question anyone about almost anything. I’d also done my fair share of deconstructing the dynamics that describe a large part of our family history, but somehow I’d managed, for more than two decades, not to look too closely at this. “I suppose they just got rid of them, buried them somewhere,” I told my cousin. “I don’t think that’s legal,” she replied.
Within minutes of hanging up the phone with her, I called the funeral home in the town where I grew up and where my mother died. The director, the father of a high school friend, answered. “I have them right here,” Mr. Massulo said, as if we had last spoken the previous week instead of 23 ago. I pictured a shelf with various containers above a dimly lit desk. “Where do you want me to send them?”
Two days later, the UPS van pulled into our driveway and the driver, in brown shorts and knee socks, climbed down and handed me a package wrapped in brown paper. Although I had no idea of what to expect, I was startled that it was so heavy. As the truck pulled away, I stood there and held my mother in my arms.
When my brothers, sister, and I gathered to open the rusted, decaying can, we fingered the gravelly dust that had been her flesh, unable to fathom the larger pieces we knew to be bone, and although we each took a small handful back to our respective homes, we were at loss about what to do with the rest of them. None of us were longing for a grave site to visit and scattering them after having just retrieved them didn’t feel right.
And then there was Dad.
We agreed that I’d wait until he was stronger to tell him and a few months later, it was time. I was nervous; I didn’t want him to hear what I’d done as a reproach for something he hadn’t done so long ago, but I didn’t want him to shrug them off either. I wanted it — I wanted her — to matter.
He paused to take in my words, but not for long. “Good,” he said. “Now you can bury us together.”
For the next eight years, my mother’s ashes sat in their corroding can in the brown cardboard box on the top shelf of my front hall closet. My father didn’t ask to see them; we didn’t discuss them. He grew frail and, as his 85th birthday approached, I felt compelled to ask if he had any special wishes for us to follow after he died.
I learned a lot from my father during the years after his stroke. Where he had once lived on his own, he was now dependent on a full-time aide for almost everything. But over time he made peace with his plight and focused, it seemed, on what he had — a wonderful companion, many close friends and a loving family — instead of what he had lost. He learned to be patient with himself and, by extension, with us, and was more present than he had ever been. Finally, in the weeks before his death, he was able to draw us even closer and open up in ways that bore little resemblance to the other death we had shared 30 years earlier.
But I thought he was joking when, in answer to my question about his post mortem, he replied, “I want to be in your front hall closet.” “C’mon Dad,” I said, lightly punching his arm. “What do you really want?” “I want to be in your front hall closet,” he repeated with finality.
For a year, my father’s ashes sat side-by-side with my mother’s in my front hall closet. Then we all gathered at the cemetery where my mother’s parents lay and poured the contents of their two cans into the earth, bringing them inextricably together. Finally, we stepped back to read the footstone on which we had engraved what we want to remember most about their lives.
Joan S. Marton
June 4, 1926-January 22, 1975
Edwin A. Marton
March 12, 1920-August 12, 2005
“They loved greatly and were greatly loved.”