TheBanyanTree: Two Days; Two Funerals

[tobie at shpilchas.net]

Ah yes, the anonymity.

	When you’re reduced to ashes, you’re tiny and manageable and can be put in an urn.  For some reason, in my mind and heart, I can’t identify the person I loved with the ashes in a neat package. Perhaps it’s that I’m Jewish and in Jewish law you return yourself to the soil. No fancy stuff and no bowers of flowers that bloom in the sun. Plain pine box. Say the mourner’s Kaddish. Lower the box into the earth. Toss your handful of dirt over the coffin. Death is the final ritual to life. All life’s passages are heavy with ritual in Judaism.  Birth, adulthood, marriage, death. There are more but those are the major markers.  Is there any ritual when there is a cremation? I honestly don’t know.  Funerals are for the living, and the living need to be participants in a finality. We need it so we can say our peace,  turn away and continue.   Then there’s this issue of cremation creating litter—reduced to the contents of a vase and sprinkled where it’s legal to do so. Permits for everything. Yes, Dale. They find a way to get you on the way in and on the way out. Is it an argument for living in small villages where no bureaucracy is necessary or really possible? Any way you think about it, we must be carried away. 

	There’s really no debate about all this. You can’t argue that one way is right and the other wrong, though I would probably protest the setting-the-wife-on-fire-with-her-deceased-husband tradition. And I know that cremation doesn’t wind up being such a neat package because I scattered my partner Michael’s ashes and he was heavy with cubic footage. 

	It was an ordeal getting the Neptune Society’s urn through the inspection line at the airport. They stopped us. The official smiled while he donned gloves and asked me to open the urn. He wiggled a finger in side Michael to make sure he wasn’t an explosive (he didn’t ask about his personality). It was quite macabre. He gave a pass on Michael but made me hand over the Ensure I’d packed in my suitcase. For some reason, I set off the alarms: petite senior woman with autistic adult son flying from Oakland to Seattle. Yeah. I’d stop those terrorists! We got on the plane a few pounds lighter in liquids but just as weighty in cremains.  Michael wanted to be scattered someplace woodsy and familiar, so we took his ashes up where he’d lived for 40 years and drove out into the SquamishPohamishqueamish river area and crawled out on the rocks while the water gushed by.  Ashes do not scatter politely. They fly back at you, spill on your shoes, dust the foliage. We saved half of Michael to return and scatter the rest in Tilden park in the hills east of Berkeley. He once wanted to be a forest ranger so it seemed right. That was his plan but Vietnam interrupted. The forest ranger returned a corpsman in the Marines which wasn’t his choice. Knowing his number was coming up, he and his brother enlisted in the Navy. The idea was: on a boat in the ocean doing paperwork, as far as possible from rolling around in the dirt in the tropics of Vietnam. His brother wound up learning computer systems on a boat. Michael wound up being a corpsman attached to a Marine unit in Vietnam, rolling around in the dirt in the tropics. There were five corpsmen in his unit. Two came back alive. He said he went through it without a scratch, but that isn’t true at all. The experience killed him from the inside. And then decades later the exposure to the military’s chemical experiments in Vietnam gave him Myelofibrosis, a rare blood cancer. I saw him through it to the end. (Oh my gosh. It just struck me. For years there I was sole caregiver to my nonagenarian mother, my autistic son and my dying partner. How did I do that?)

	This was a large tangent brought to you by the queen of tangents. My sister was cremated and her husband and (don’t get me started) her replacement wife walked off with the cremains. No ceremony. Lots of posts on FaceBook (Lord! What a demise! To be announced on Facebook …… Brandy has twenty five thousand two hundred sixteen friends on FaceBook).

	You could "get me started" if requested. But you might feel uncomfortable. We all did.

	After all that blather, I want to remember Dale’s stories. 

Tobie

> On Sep 5, 2021, at 11:28 AM, dale.m.parish--- via TheBanyanTree <thebanyantree at lists.remsset.com> wrote:
> 
> Tobie rote:
>> Cremation can create an anonymity that adds to the grieving. When I go, put me in a plain box and return me to the earth. 
>> I want to contribute to growing plants and flowers. Then nobody need come visit me to slap a swatch of plastic posies on the site.  
> 
> Tobie;
> I don't know or understand the anonymity of cremation, but each to their own.  As the patron for my  Parish family now, I've inherited unofficially the problems with a family cemetery that isn't under any kind of perpetual care arrangement, and because there's no deed of the three tracts that went in to form the joint cemetery, under Texas law, mostly written by the undertakers association, we can't create a cemetery association without many more dollars in lawyers fees than it would take to fund perpetual care.  I'd rather be cremated or put into one of those tree plantings with the ashes so that no one has to worry about who mows the weeds over my plot.  I've filed the papers to donate my body to science knowing that the universities will dispose of the ashes after this body has served any more useful purpose after I'm through with it.  Seems we can't just go out without leaving problems for someone else.
> 
> Glad you enjoyed the recollections.
> 
> Hugs,
> Dale
> --
> Dale M. Parish			For All Of Mankind'S Supposed Accomplishments,
> 628 Parish RD			Our Continued Existence Is Dependent Upon 20
> Orange TX 77632-0264		Centimeters Of Topsoil And The Fact That It Rains.
> Dale.M.Parish at gmail.com			--Toilet Stall Wall
> 409-790-2352
> 
> 
> 
> 
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"Pica: a bad cook’s dream guest" THS, 2021





Tobie Helene Shapiro
tobie at shpilchas.net