TheBanyanTree: A Story About Ashes

[Pam North]

A few years before my father died, a friend of his beat him to it.  The man
was also a neighbor, so my dad was able to witness up close the spending of
more than $10,000 for a plush casket and a funeral service loaded with
flowers.  Dad decided then and there that he wanted no part of any of that!


He'd always said he wanted to, 'Live fast, die hard, and leave a good
looking corpse'.  Right up until he started to die hard and realized his
corpse was still going to look old and used up.  Then he stopped saying
that, but did tell us he would be cremated and his ashes would NOT be buried
in some crypt!  So while those of us planning on being left behind, worried
where we would go to lay flowers and mourn,  he told us we could just flush
them down the toilet of a whorehouse.  Yes, my dad was a colorful kind of
guy!

So, after Jack died, Dad called the local crematorium and requested a price
list.  Oh my, we laughed about that!  A person could still spend thousands
of dollars for an urn.  And the list started with the most expensive and
continued on for a few pages until the last urn listed:  "Cardboard Box.
Price:  $0.00"  Since he expected us to toss his ashes somewhere, a
cardboard box was all he wanted for any interim amount of time.

I remember visiting, sitting at the kitchen table, perusing this list with
my dad and mom.  And I remember how funny it was, and how we all cried from
laughing, when I suggested instead the colorful box from my son's new pair
of Power Ranger tennis shoes!

One would think, when he did die, that the laughing stopped.  But one would
be wrong.

My mom and I, along with a couple of other relatives went to the funeral
home to make arrangements.  They didn't cremate dad right away because my
mom was waiting for the authorities to get my brother there from the
prison he was incarcerated in.  (As a side story, I'd been angry with my
brother and hadn't seen him in a few years.  But the three of us gathered
peacefully around my dad and let him know that even in death he'd gotten his
way - all his kids were together again!)  So there we were, looking at the
display of urns that the nice solemn lady from the funeral home felt
compelled to show us.  One of them looked like a toaster, and I said so!  My
family laughed.  The nice solemn lady watched us in horror!  In fact, my dad
was surely proud of how I described most of the urns and had the family
rolling.  I don't do solemn very well which is just as well because my dad
wouldn't have appreciated it much at all.

But we did pay closer attention when the lady offered little 'mini urns' -
small statues with a hidden well in the bottom for a small bag of ashes to
be stored.  Hmmm...??  I'd never heard of this, but these statues allowed
family to keep a small part of the dead with them forever.  I liked that
idea.  For all my father's faults and character flaws, I'd always worshipped
him and turned out to be a lot like him.

We had two choices.  A 'hunting' statue with deer, or another of two
dolphins jumping and frolicking in waves.  Since my father had never ever in
life been a hunter, but had been in the ocean, I chose the dolphins.  It was
heavy metal of some kind, but it had been treated to look 'old'... I'm not
sure how to describe it... It looked like it may have been sitting in the
ocean for years and was sort of green'd.  Kind of like an 'antiquing' thing,
only not.

After my dad had retired from the Army, he'd started his own business
hanging wallpaper.  It was begun quite accidentally, but it turned out he
was good at it and enjoyed it, so he made it his profession.  My brother had
worked with him and started hanging paper at age 12.  My sister had worked
for him cutting and pasting, as a part-time job.  I was off in the Marine
Corps so I never earned a dime, but I sure spent a lot of hours watching him
when I visited.  And I was even able to paper a few small rooms on my own
later on.

My dad died less than three weeks before I was due to head for Italy for a
six month deployment.  Between packing for myself, packing for my kids to go
to their dad's, packing up a household, and going back and forth the three
hour drive to home, it was a pretty hectic time.  I didn't think about his
ashes again.

But when I returned home, they were there.  The cardboard box sat under the
coffee table waiting for a couple of dad's friends to scatter them over the
water at a particular hole at the golf course that they had all spent hours
playing at.  Water that had absorbed dozens of mis-aimed golf balls during
his lifetime.  And there was my dolphin statue with its little hidden
compartment of ashes.  I took the statue to my new house, and it sat on a
shelf with a picture of him, and an old trophy he'd earned years before from
the 82nd Airborne.

Until I decided to hang wallpaper in the bathroom of my new house.  I'd
chosen a darker paisley paper... mauves and pinks and greens.  And when I
set up to hang the paper, I brought 'Dad' in to talk to, and ask advice
from.  "How's that dad?  Is it straight?  How'm I doing?"  When I was done,
I thought the bathroom looked terrific!  I really liked the paper on the
walls, and I really liked the colors.  Then I realized how well 'Dad'
matched the room!  The 'greening'  on the statue matched the paper almost
perfectly, and that is how it came to be that my 'Dad' didn't get flushed
into any toilet, but he did end up spending years sitting on the back of one
as decoration!

Eventually dad's buddies had collected his ashes and took them to the golf
course, and threw them over the water.  I can only imagine the fun they had,
the jokes they told while they did it.  (Dad's friends were about as
colorful as he was!!)  It was hole number three.  That's the only part my
sister and I remembered.

Because the first Christmas we were home after he died, she and I put on our
Santa hats and drove to the golf course and went and visited him.  There was
a little bridge over tiny creek just before hole three, and she and I stood
on it and laughed and reminisced and filled him in on our lives, and what
was going on in the family.  We even looked to see if we could spot any
errant ashes that hadn't been washed away!

It was only after we got back home and told our story over dinner that we
were informed that we'd gone to the WRONG golf course!  And we ended up
never knowing *whose* father we were talking to!!

Pam