Ashes to Dust

I forgot to warn the rest of the family that spreading the ashes of a human body is nothing at all like it is in the movies. The wind doesn’t carry them off like sparkling fairy dust. There isn’t a beautiful song playing in the background. The ashes are coarse and there are chips of bone and teeth left in them. The parts that do burn down fine enough stick to your skin and clothes.

 

I knew though. I knew what it was going to sound like when his ashes hit the ground (because it does make a sound). I knew what he was going to feel like as he slipped through my fingers like a mixture of gravel and dust. I knew what it smelled like, how it tasted when the wind kicked it back in our breathing air. I knew that he would creep under our fingernails. I already knew so it didn’t hurt. It didn’t scare me. It didn’t startle. It didn’t lose it’s magic.

 

My dad and I stood at the edge of a large half buried bolder. We tossed handfuls of his father into the air and watched him scatter between the needles of the pine trees and settle between rocks and tufts of wildflowers. We felt him slip between our fingers in pieces as fine as snow and as coarse as rocks. We saw him against the mountains surrounding us. We listened to him as he took to the wind. We heard the pieces of his bones tinkle along the mountainside. We smelled and tasted what his burned up body smelled and tasted like. We washed him from our cheeks with our tears.

 

And in a broken voice my dad whispered, “And it goes on and on and on…”

 

This is what he asked us to do, but this is more importantly where he belonged. This is where I remembered him the most, and where he was the happiest. This was my grandpa. This was my father’s father. A Navy man. A sailor. A captain. The siren that stole his heart took shape in the majestic snow capped mountain range. And this was his burial at sea.  And here we laid him with his lover. Here we laid him with the creation of the God he served. Here he rested. Here he went on and on and on…