Now Where Should I Scatter My Ashes?

I was caught in a holiday traffic scrum while driving in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. While at a red light I noticed a van to my left bearing the following advertisement: “Caskets Made with Love for your Departed Loved Ones.” From the markings this casket business seemed to be part of a holding company.

My first thought was about whether a decent size casket could really fit into a van that seemed quite small. I thought that perhaps the van carried only casket accoutrements, such as handles, rollers and white gloves. I wondered if caskets still represented a good business.

My quick answer was yes. My gym is right across from a funeral home and regularly, especially on weekends, that house of death seems busier than my house of life and fitness. A few days after my encounter with the casket van I noticed at least fifty firefighters in full battle dress piping a colleague into the next dimension. Frankly, I felt some solidarity with these gentlemen even though I noticed they were taking up most of the parking spots in the gym parking lot. I bridled at my own pettiness.

I recall reading a poem many years ago about a son who thought his father quite ordinary until the old man retired and went to every funeral in town. As the son aged he saw a nobility and graciousness in his father’s actions. The father’s behavior was the opposite of the Dylan Thomas advice to his dying father: to rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My father died when I was fifteen. I can still recall his gaunt face and worried look that could not be covered by cosmetics. I remember his thinning hair brushed back tight and severe. What I most remember was the luscious casket that seemed to be trimmed in silver and gold. I was amazed by this because my family has been in America for only three years and was dirt poor.

Thirty years later my mother died and I had my father’s remains disinterred to be buried alongside her. That I had a close relationship with my mother had something to do with this decision. More to the point, while grieving in the basement of my home in Allentown, PA, I heard or thought I heard my father’s voice coming through the basement wall. It summoned me in a garbled tongue to “Come to me.” I was a little crazy at the time and followed the summons.

The cemetery outside of Pittsburgh, PA, was largely abandoned and downtrodden but I managed to find my father’s grave. His remains were later transferred to Bethlehem in an infant casket. When going through my mother’s papers I found an invoice from the Skeleton Funeral Home for about $70. (The name is no joke). It was for a wooden box. The gold and silver trim was for show. They removed that casing before burial and buried him in a wooden box. Thirty years later, there wasn’t much left of him.

Death is a bugger, as my father might say. I recall talking to an older brother about the death of our sister. Because she lived in England and we lived in America, I suggested cremation. His response was an emphatic no. “She had been annihilated all her life,” he said. Our sister had lived in an orphanage for more than a decade and was largely abandoned by our mother. Death is never easy.

I have been to her grave twice and likely won’t visit again. My parents are buried about a hundred miles from my home and I seldom visit their graves. For a lot of reasons I’m looking for a different resting place. In my faintly biographical novel, “Bunker Kills: A Sea Story,” the main character is running away from religion, his past and mainly his mother. She dies while he is at sea and in time her cremated remains are sent to him. He retreats to his ship’s fantail and scatters his mother’s ashes into the South China Sea, catching a little of his mother in the face, courtesy of a shift in the wind. He hopes his mother ends up in the Indian Ocean.

But life can follow art. The Navy actually has a program that allows for the cremated remains of Navy veterans to be scattered at sea. I was stationed in San Francisco and recall fondly all the times my ships sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge. Steaming west under the bridge was like a coming into adult consciousness for me. I would be gone for nine months or longer and it was as if the clock started, reminding me to get focused and serious. I think that might be the ideal spot for my ashes.

I have been to Japan many times and have visited Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the two atomic bomb sites. Each city is filled with overtures towards peace and remembrances of a war Japan started. War is in the distant past but is now staring Japan in the face again. Hiroshima is less than five hundred miles from North Korea.

I spent a lot of time in these waters on a ship carrying 2,000-pound bombs to be dropped on North Vietnam. I would later learn that America dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than throughout the entire World War II in Europe. Over my lifetime this has become a moral and ethical issue, as history most assuredly tells us the Vietnam War was built on a lie.

So maybe my ashes could be scattered off the coast of Vietnam or in the Sea of Japan or in Japan’s inland waterways, as a remembrance and witness to the power of healing and forgiveness.

As solemn as all this is, I have to laugh at myself, sensing I’m back on that heroic arc, full of myself and stinking of Icarus. The psychologist Carl Jung would surely find inflation in these remarks and send me to the corner to cool off.

Perhaps I’ll take off my international shoes and settle on the Hudson River, a stone’s throw away, as my final resting place. As I think about that river I see and hear a boisterous dance involving six blue jays outside my office window. They move between a dogwood, the rim of the gutter, a rhododendron and the lid of my garbage can. What I hear is not exactly dance music. Rather, it begins as a series of competitive clucks, followed by what seems like a jeer, then some whirrs, whines and more clucks as the birds continued their theatrics, whispering, whirring and feigning their martial moves as they fly through what’s seems like a well-rehearsed competitive arc. Then they move to another clump of trees and perform a similar pantomime.

I am reading a marvelous book, “The Genius of Birds” by Jennifer Ackerman and getting a thorough education about the intelligence or cognition of birds. Birds seem to possess distinct types of cognition — spatial, social, technical and vocal. Ackerman writes that a “bird can be smart spatially without being gifted in social problem solving.” And forget the pejorative term “bird brain.”

With help from this book, I am gaining a new appreciation of all birds that live on or visit my place. I have an appreciation for the noisy crows who seem to know when their favorite seed or grub is on the land; the woodpeckers who painstakingly police at first light my dying trees, searching for grubs; the hawks that circle the place looking for squirrels; the chickadees that lean over a branch backwards to catch a bug; and the one bald eagle that once perched in an oak tree, reigning over the place.

So I’m going to ground, so to speak. My ashes will be scattered at the base of a towering blue spruce where the blue jays live and perhaps some at the base of the trees where the woodpeckers do their work. If I am no longer at this address, my family will know that I want to be in among the birds.

I am doing my best to attract purple martins that belong to the swallow family. I understand they fly to Brazil for the winter. I just might go along for the ride.