Author's Notes

My mother had planned a gathering at her house for Saturday, April 26th, for the scattering of my father's ashes. The closer the date got, the more anxious I became about attending. To me, it felt like it was getting way out of hand. She'd invited a few of their friends from church and me and my brothers and their families and some of our cousins. The minister that presided over Dad's memorial service was to preside over this event as well. And my older brother had invited his preacher, too. It was becoming a much larger event than I thought I could handle. Not to mention way more religious as well. When she had originally proposed the idea, I suggested that it be very small, immediate family only. But that's not what my mother wanted.

So, I decided not to attend. The weekend beforehand, I was over at my mother's house. I told her I wasn't going to come because I just wasn't ready to say goodbye to my father yet. Her first impulse was to postpone the event for whenever I might be ready. I told her that I may never be ready, that she should go ahead and do the ceremony since everyone else was ready now. She wasn't happy with my decision. But I thought she might have understood when she told me a story that I'd heard before, of when my father didn't attend his own father's funeral because he didn't want his last memory of his father to be that of seeing him in a coffin. But when she asked if I could do it for her, I knew she didn't understand. I told her that I went to Dad's memorial service for her. She said she'd wanted me to go to that for myself. And she told me that she thought I'd handled my father's memorial service just fine. I was so not fine. It was extremely stressful for me. I wasn't going to put myself through that again if I didn't have to.

That was also the same weekend I finally got some of my father's ashes. I had tried to get some of them the year before, but I just got too weak in the knees when I even thought about cutting the plastic ties that were around the heavy plastic bags. My mother suggested that I wait until another time. And she was the one who brought up the subject again that weekend when she asked if I still wanted some of my father's ashes. I told her that I did, and that I had hoped to actually get them that day. But I didn't tell my mother the reason why I wanted to get the ashes then, which was because I didn't trust my brothers to save some for me. After what they did to me regarding my father's obituary, I didn't want to take any chances on them saying that I didn't deserve any of his ashes because I wasn't there on the day they were going to scatter them.

My mother asked if I had my container with me. I said yes, that it was still in the hutch in her dining room, where I'd left it last year. So I got the container, then picked up the box of my father's ashes, set it on the table, pulled out the bag, wedged one of the blades of a small pair of scissors under the plastic ties, and squeezed. I had to use a lot of force to cut the tie. So much force in fact that when the blades of the scissors came together, apparently the pad of my index finger was in the way and it got pinched. It left a blood blister, which I think helped me not to get weak in the knees again. The pain gave me the adrenaline to handle digging in my father's ashes and scooping them out into a small plastic bag. Then to my surprise, my mother also wanted some of his ashes for herself. So, I scooped out some for her as well. She wanted to have some of his ashes scattered with hers after her death. She acknowledged that it wasn't what my dad wanted, but it was what she wanted. And she wanted me to keep the baggie for her. So, I just took it home with me.

I scattered my dad's ashes on the anniversary of his death a week later. You can read more about it in the next poem, The Ties That Bind.

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