Writing Wednesday: Gravel to Gravel
This week's Creative Non-Fiction assignment was to write an essay on family, and I wrote about spreading my grandparents' ashes this past spring. It's a lot funnier than it sounds. I read it aloud in class yesterday and everyone seemed to enjoy it, especially my professor, who had been encouraging us to experiment with humor styles. Oddly enough, two of the other stories we read were about dead grandparents as well.
Years ago my father’s parents had decided that when they died they wanted to be cremated, mixed together, and spread over the hills of their farm outside of Hermann, Missouri. It was a sweet idea, a way to leave a romantic punctuation mark at the inevitable end of their sixty years of marriage. I obviously wouldn’t say that I was looking forward to such an event, but ever since I heard of their plan it comforted me to know that even after they had finished living on the farm, they would always “live” on the farm.
They both passed away this spring, Grandpa following Grandma after exactly 75 days. The two of them “just wore themselves out,” my father says. It wasn’t until then that I had given any detailed thought to their final wishes. As soon as I had been delivered the news about Grandpa and traded an “I love you, talk to you later” with my tired parents on the phone, I realized that I didn’t know how a family went about spreading ashes. I’d never seen it done.
My single frame of reference was the end of the The Big Lebowski when Walter and The Dude try to pour the coffee can of Donnie’s ashes into the Pacific Ocean, only to have the coastal winds blow him back into their grimacing faces. I was fairly sure that wasn’t going to happen, but then again Fargo was based on a true story and it showed that Steve Buschemi could easily be fed through a wood-chipper, so him catching the wind and coating John Goodman and Jeff Bridges in a fine layer of former-friend could have been just as factual.
But how did the everyday non-Coen person “spread” ashes? What did you put them in? How were they distributed? You didn’t just take the urn and dump it out on some patch of grass, right?
I pictured crop-dusting planes, rock concert confetti cannons, and those little wheeled chalk-grinders that draw the white lines on baseball diamonds. Maybe my brothers and cousins and I would each be given a pouch of grandparents and sent to toss handfuls of them out into the fields like morbid Johnny Appleseeds. Did we wear gloves for this ceremony? What would we do if the ashes touched us? Wipe our family-coated hands off on our pants legs? If they got in our mouths would we sputter and spit them out like we were on a motorcycle ride and they were bugs that flew into our teeth?
I didn’t even know what ashes looked like. My father had been the one to pick up Grandma from the crematorium two months prior, but she was contained in a seamless wooden box, one that my mother had deemed necessary to label with a post-it note marked “Grandma.” I hadn’t had the opportunity to pick her up or carry her at all before the box was taken to Grandpa, and I certainly wasn’t going to shake her like a Christmas present, so I didn’t know if the box was heavy or light, filled to the brim or left with some room. How much ash did a woman burn down to? How much space would the two of them take up together now that they were reduced to basic carbon?
The small memorial was held on Mother’s Day, just a few weeks after Grandpa’s return from the crematorium in a matching wooden box. There was never a full funeral or a wake or a proper visitation with the friends and distant relatives, possibly due to the farm’s location in the middle of nowhere - a pleasant and picturesque nowhere, but nowhere nonetheless. This was the sort of place where you had to drive half an hour into town to buy a gallon of milk. Instead there was just a gathering of the immediate family, surprisingly casual. Everyone wore jeans and t-shirts and ate barbeque. We even lit a bonfire and made s’mores. I called it a s’momorial.
For the spreading of the ashes, we were gathered on what could be considered the “front lawn” of the hundreds of rolling green acres that was the farm. My father read a poem, his two brothers nodded in agreement, and his sister opened up the single box into which she earlier had poured both her parents. I had been expecting ashes to be a charcoal-grey powder, supple and downy as baking flour, but it looked more like gravel. My grandparents were now pale, chalky, coarse dust and a few clumps that were nearly indistinguishable from the tiny white rocks that made up their driveway.
Grandpa had been a blacksmith by hobby, forging art out of iron, everything from blooming roses to a book with individual metal pages. He had once made an oversized fork and spoon to hang on the wall of his kitchen, each utensil about two feet long and finished with a decorative curl at one end. It was the spoon that my aunt held. All those devices and contraptions I’d imagined spreading the ashes with, and we were going to use a spoon.
My father, the oldest child, dug the spoon into the box and flung the ashes across the freshly-trimmed grass. Then his younger siblings, the spouses, and the grandchildren each took their turn. The ashes scraped against the spoon as I dug into the rough, compact mixture, the only time my grandparents had ever resisted my embrace. There were a few black cinders mixed in there with them, a result of my aunt’s promise to burn a book for Grandma so that she would always have something to read. As I followed the rest of my family in flinging the ashes over the hill and across the dirt path leading to the creek, I hoped that Grandma really liked Jodi Picoult because that’s what she was stuck with.
The handing of the spoon continued down to the great-grandchildren. As my cousin’s young step-son, a recent addition to the family, shrugged and accepted it, a breeze picked up and carried the fine dust of the ashes into his face. So it was like The Big Lebowski after all, except with less of The Dude’s serenity and more of an eleven-year-old’s yelling and slapping at his face while the family stares at him, not knowing if they should laugh or cry.