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.
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