Ashes, Ashes Everywhere
By: Carrie Thompson
Tags: Grief, This Is Us, Suicide, Grieving Process, Death

Ashes, Ashes Everywhere

Ben’s hat, Mt. Garfield Summit

The first days after my son’s suicide were punctuated with question marks. Words uttered in library whispers by well-meaning relatives or friends hinted at the questions that always swirl around suicide. None of them were answerable, except to say that my son was fiercely private about his inner struggles. He didn’t want to burden anyone by sharing his darkness, so he hid it all behind smiles and laughter.

I preferred the questions I could answer, the simpler ones related to the business of death.

Who is writing the obituary?

I am, with input from my family.

Where do you want to publish it?

Online and in our home newspaper.

Burial or cremation?

Cremation, please.

We have a range of options for the body, from an unadorned box to the fanciest of caskets. What do you prefer?

The box suits him; he used to keep his clothes together with duct tape.

Do you want remembrance jewelry?

Jewelry? Oh, with ashes in them?

What kind of container do you want for the ashes? Where do you want to put them?

These last two questions stumped me.

One of Ben’s professors in college deemed him a “force of nature,” a description so apt we used it in the obituary. Ben was elemental, connected to the natural world he loved, and he was impossible to contain in life. His spirit seemed too large for any container to hold him in death.

Ben never stayed anywhere for long. His grandmother called him her will-o’-the-wisp, an element that drifted in and out of her life, dropping by without notice to share an order of crab rangoon or raid her refrigerator for leftovers. A sudden invitation to spend a week at a friend’s slope-side cabin coupled with an impending snowstorm saw him depart a family visit — right after dinner, on Christmas Eve — to drive north. He never could resist the siren’s song of fresh snow.

Unannounced, last-minute adventures were his signature. He existed in so many places to me: How could we confine him to a single location in death?

Any decision seemed impossible. I needed time to think about it, to talk to my husband and our children.

We settled on scattering tubes, which come in several varieties and sizes depending on the purpose. We chose cardboard single-use tubes with outdoor scenes, like a sunset or the mountains, for Ben’s closest friends. There were small, discreet wooden tubes for travel to distant areas. And resealable metal ones in velvet cases for scattering ashes in multiple places.

But the containers we chose didn’t hold all the ashes. I received a box containing the rest the day of the funeral. I knew there were still places he longed to go, and I would take him.

The funeral director’s face paled when I asked him to tell me about the ashes, but he patiently explained that the remains are similar in size and weight to a five-pound sack of flour. Later, when I looked it up, I learned that the composition and color of remains are influenced by their exposure to minerals, metals, and elements stored in the bones. The amount of body fat can affect the color. (More body fat can cause the ashes to be darker in color, for example.)