punchdrunkmom

The Cremation Society of Minnesota

The next day, we met with the minister to talk about the memorial service, and Mom asked if I wanted to go with her to the Cremation Society.

I absolutely did not want to go, and neither did Laurel, but it seemed like a thing we should do to support our mother, so we went.

“This parking lot is hilariously oversized,” Laurel observed as we pulled into it, and she was not wrong. It was huge, maybe as big as a football field.

Just so you know I'm not joking.

Trying to crack her up, I parked as far away from the door as I could, our lone car huddled near the edge of the vast, empty lot. It worked, and we were still trying to suppress giggles when we sat down around a table while a woman from the Cremation Society took information about Dad.

It turns out that being a card carrying member of the Cremation Society of Minnesota doesn’t get you very much at all. There were no tan robes, no support group, nothing much of anything to warrant such a robust and important looking card.

I also thought that being a member of the Cremation Society meant that my dad had registered with them, that all the questions and info were there, all the files, numbers, names, dates and places were in the system, waiting only the date and time of death, which Mike already had. Having given birth to two children, I can tell you that I had a mountain of pre-birth paperwork to do so that when I showed up to labor and delivery with fast contractions and ballet flats full of amniotic fluid we didn’t have to waste time digging out my insurance card.

Plus, my dad was a planner. It gave him things to worry over and he loved having things to worry over. He kept a “dead book” from his days in the military, and in it was everything his surviving relatives would need if he died—military records and birth certificates and passwords and financial information and the whereabouts of wills and other artifacts.

Sitting there in the Cremation Society, a woman named Allison asked us to start with Dad’s full name. That's how little this membership bought us. 

Laurel and I looked at each other, then dug out our phones and sat there hunched over them like two sullen teenagers, looking up only to make snarky remarks about “modestly priced receptacles” to each other. Allison did her best to ignore us and doggedly asked my mother question after question. My mom had to give Dad’s parents names and places of birth, his social security number, dates of military service, his Army rank.

“This is a lot of personal information,” my mother remarked. “How secure are your servers?”

Allison brightened. “Oh! We just got bought out by a company in Florida, so they’re very secure.”

My mom raised her eyebrows and Laurel cocked her head and I, in mortal danger of exploding from laughter, I excused myself and found the restroom.

I mean, nothing bad ever happens in Florida, right?

:::

Dad’s cremains would come home in a cardboard box unless we wanted an urn, so we dutifully went to the urn room to check them out. They were mostly horrible, and we all carefully ignored the small ones meant for children. Mom had actually picked one out on Amazon that she liked, and went to find it in her phone as we examined the urns. There were marble ones, religious ones, simple ones made from wood. I picked one up and managed to poke at a knot in the wood with my thumb and the whole knot came apart from the box. Laurel and I wished we'd had a Ralph’s can and Mom realized that the urn she’d liked came from a place that sold pet supplies and she wondered if she could put Dad’s ashes in a dog urn if we got one big enough for like a bull mastiff and I think there was strictly too much laughter coming from the urn room at the Cremation Society for Allison’s liking.

“You can put the ashes in a Skippy jar if you want to,” she said crisply, swiping my mother’s credit card.

:::

When we finally left, stepping out the door into the gray October afternoon, free to laugh openly about the Skippy jar comment and away from Allison and the Cremation Society with it’s conspicuous lack of tan robes and support, I let myself, for a brief moment, think about my dad lying in there, perhaps still inside the black body bag. And I wished that this place was more like the one in my imagination, where his friends in the Society would gather round to witness the cremation of one of their own.

Actually, made that up just now. I didn’t wish that. I wished with all my heart that my father was still alive.

I thought I’d asked him all the questions I needed to ask him while I still could, but I was so wrong. I found that I had a burning one that came on all of a sudden in that too-big parking lot of the place that would turn his familiar face, his hands, his shoulders, his ears, into ash.

I wished I could ask him if he was proud of the way I’d helped him die.

Madison

My dad was a card carrying member of the Minnesota Cremation Society, and by card-carrying member, I mean that he had a card that he carried around in his wallet, along with his credit cards and pictures of his grandkids. The card was plastic like a credit card and looked very official.

I knew that he wanted to be cremated because he’d said so. Many times. This was a puzzle to me because he was also the family historian, and knew the locations of every burial plot for every deceased family member going back dozens if not hundreds of years. I brought this up to him a few years ago, long before he got sick, that he would leave us without a grave to visit. He said that he was aware of the irony, but it didn’t change his mind. He said that it was his wish that my brother, sister and I get together and spread his ashes at the top of Crested Butte in Colorado, maybe get a memorial bench up there if we needed to have something, some marker. I told him that by the time he died, we’d all be too old to hike up Crested Butte, but here we are.

I don’t know what I thought you did as a member of the Cremation Society, but I sort of thought that you got together with other like minded people and talked about how you wanted to be cremated. A support group, if you will. Maybe you talked about how to inform your family or sell a previously-purchased burial plot on Craig’s List. For some reason, I pictured the participants to be wearing tan hooded robes, like an order of monks. And if it sounds ridiculous that I thought about this at all—it might, especially when you get to the robe part—you should know that the Minnesota Cremation Society had a billboard up for a while near the running path by my parents’ condo along the Mississippi River. I think the only words were “Minnesota Cremation Society” with a picture of an urn, and running past it on several occasions, alone with one’s thoughts, one’s imagination can begin to take over.

:::

We sat with him for several hours after he died before we called the number on the back of that card. My mom talked to them. I don’t know what they said, what trigger the phone call had started when a member of the Society passes away, but when they showed up, Mom was in the room with Dad, so I answered the door.

A middle aged man stood in the doorway, flanked by a gurney with a body bag on it, and a blonde girl of about twenty-two.

The man introduced himself as Mike, in the hushed tones one associates with a funeral director, and he introduced his associate, Madison. I was completely distracted by Madison, who couldn’t have looked more out of place with her long, blonde hair, the spray of acne across her cheeks, her business-professional attire looking more like a costume than anything a girl her age would pick out, like she borrowed her plain black slacks (slacks!) and her rubber-soled shoes from her mom. I wondered what she was doing driving around St. Paul picking up bodies with this guy. She’d answered an ad, though, right? I mean, she applied for the job. She must be here of her own free will.

“I have a few questions for you,” Mike said.

With effort, I dragged my eyes off of Madison to meet Mike’s.

“My mom is in the other room, she’d probably do a better job,” I replied.

Mike smiled at me, “You’re going to do just fine,” he assured me, beginning to fill out a form with the date. The gurney was in the hallway. I wondered if the neighbors were like, omg there’s a gurney with a body bag on it in the hall.

“Time of death?” Mike asked.

“I’m not actually sure,” I said. “I had gone out for coffee and he died while I was gone and I remember the clock reading 8:37 when I got back, but then we weren’t a hundred per cent sure for a while because we thought he might still be breathing?”

“8:37,” Mike said as he wrote.

“I’m not sure of that, though,” I said. On all the medical shows it seems like the time of death was a big deal. Eriq LaSalle rips off his stethoscope and barks disgustedly, “Time of death, 9:42,” as the flatline drones.

Mike looked up at me with an expression of sympathy mixed with pity and I understood that the exact time of death didn’t matter one whit, that you could write anything down on that piece of paper. 

I was digesting the hard, unfeeling reality of that when Madison spoke up. “Wow," she said, her gaze up at the ceiling. “I didn’t realize this place had two stories.”

Mike and I stared at her for a long moment. Her eyes found Mike and she seemed to come back to us, realizing her break in hushed funereal demeanor and straightening her posture a little. I fought the urge to laugh. Mike turned back to me, the apology written all over his horrified expression. I shook my head and smiled. “It’s fine,” I said.

Mike continued with his questions. Did my dad have a pacemaker? Yes. What kind was it? I didn’t know.

My mom came out then, and Mike introduced himself. Madison, who was leaning against the kitchen island, was biting her nails.

“And this is Madison,” Mike said.

Madison took her hand out of her mouth and extended to my mother, who shook it. Mike looked like he wished he had a trap door through which he could export Madison from the room. I was loving her, though. I wondered if she was a relative of Mike’s. Perhaps he owed his brother a favor and hired his niece so she would learn the value of a dollar. She was certainly too young and too ditzy to put on a tan robe and talk with other members of the Society.

My mom took over Mike’s questions. She DID know what kind of pacemaker it was and where the box it came in was and where she wanted it sent.

My sister Laurel and I listened, still stunned, still numb, as forms were signed and Mike and Madison brought the gurney in from the hallway and Mom left, leaving us in charge.

“Would you like to be in the room when I take your father?” He asked me.

I didn’t. I knew it in my bones. I actually thought about our veterinarian, Dr. Diaz, when he put our cat JJ and our dog Elliott down, telling us we didn’t need to be there, that’d we’d given them great lives, that we didn’t want to have that be our lasting memory. But I was also aware that I was comparing my dad’s death to that of a cat, and wondered if I needed to find a way to be strong here? Hadn’t this week been about exactly that? Facing down the thing that scared me the most? Finding ways to help my dad keep the last scraps of humanity available to a dying man?

“Do I?” I asked.

Madison, bent over the gurney, stood up then, and turned to look me right in the eye.

“No, you don’t,” she said, with the surety of someone much, much older than twenty-two.

I smiled at her. Good girl, I thought.

“Thank you,” I said. “That was exactly the kind of guidance I was looking for.”

:::

Laurel and I stepped out on the balcony. She'd brought a beer she'd been saving for this purpose and some glasses, and we toasted our dad, who would have whole-heartedly approved of this action.

We were quiet for a while, processing, reflecting.

"You know who would have found that entire scene hilarious?" I asked Laurel. This would be a question I would ask her many times in the coming days, and the answer was always the same.

"Dad," she replied.