Dirt and Ashes

Last month my mom, my grandma and I finally took Pop to the cemetery. We had been meaning to do this since he died in September, but for whatever reasons (not wanting to cry anymore, not wanting to go through with this final step) we waited until June. Oh, and I should probably mention at this point that he was cremated. We didn't pull some sort of Weekend at Bernie's stunt or anything. And we decided to bury his ashes ourselves because the cemetery wanted to charge us $800.00 to dig a hole the size of a shoebox. Whatever.....

We started out at Brio on the Plaza for a nice lunch and then headed to Mount Washington Forever Cemetery. I hadn't been there since my great-grandma Dolly died when I was about 7 so I couldn't really remember much except that our family grave sites were on a steep hill. The clouds were dark as we drove, but by the time we pulled up to the hill, the sun had broken through and shone down through the thick trees over the graves. We gathered up all of our supplies; spade - check, flowers - check, water - check, Pop - check, and headed up the hill. I climbed strait up to the headstone while my mom and grandma made a zig zag pattern up the incline. While I waited for them, I held my Pop's ashes in my hands. The box that they had been in for the past several months read: The cremated remains of Dr. Clyde E. Fry. Strange. Strange for so many reasons. My Pop, who probably weighed about 160lbs when he died had been reduced to 10lbs worth of ashes that fit neatly into this little box. Strange that, according to this box, it's contents were his only "remains." I've thought about those words a lot and I've come to the conclusion that those ashes are certainly not my Pop's "remains." My Pop's remains are grandma, mom, dad, me, Danny, Ted, Louis, Shirly, Lois, Herold, Cindy, Julie, Rachel, Carmen, the guys from the ball team, his patients, his friends and everyone that his life had ever touched. His remains also include laughter, big band music, jazz, coffee, silly sayings (I almost told a patient today "Where there's no sense, there's no feeling"), goofiness, pancakes, messiness. There is much love that remains in the special part of my heart that belongs to my Pop.

When mom and grandma made it up the hill, I began to dig a hole near Pop's headstone. The ground was soft from recent rain which made the digging easy. When the hole was big enough, mom took the plastic bag of ashes out of their box and we slowly let them spill into the ground. After we covered them with a layer of soil, we planted some flowers. The flowers were pretty and all, but their main purpose was to serve as a decoy just incase the cemetery people got suspicious that we were burying the ashes ourselves, which is apparently against the rules.

So there we stood over his freshly buried ashes, the three women he loved the most in this world, the three women who loved him back with all our hearts. There were quiet emotions that we each kept to ourselves, but there were no tears. No eloquent words were said, no fuss was made. There was peace, warm sunshine, a cool breeze through the trees.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:13