A Final Goodbye (and How to Scatter Ashes)

We said goodbye to our father this weekend.

My sister refers to the occasion as “Dad Takes His Final Dip.” He’d find that hilarious, so it’s all good.

Dad was eighty-five and in terrible health, so his passing was not unexpected, and I’m pretty sure that by the end of it, he was relieved.

He’d asked that we scatter his ashes together with those of his wife (she’s dead too, in case it needs to be said).

Scattering their ashes sounded like a reasonable request. He’d picked the spot, and again, nothing unreasonable about that.

Then, we got into logistics.

Please, do not attempt any of this without learning from what we know now.

Let’s start with transportation.

Ashes are heavier than one might expect, and we were carrying two urns in a basket. By “we” I mean my sisters.

For those of you who like to do math, a quantitative assessment would suggest that the children of an eighty-five-year-old man are also senior citizens. (You’d be 60-80% correct, depending on whether you assume senior citizenship starts at fifty, but that last twenty percent is a whole other story.)

Dad’s chosen location was easy enough to get to on foot. Carrying two urns in a basket to the river was not insurmountable.

Getting those urns to the water’s edge was where things got complicated.

If we were launching a canoe, we’d have had no problems. One of us, however, was waiting for a knee replacement. (That would be me.) Our brother was suffering from what was most likely Covid, and while the chills and fever were gone, he was light-headed. That left the sister with the two hip replacements and the baby of the family to take care of the dipping.

The sister with the two hip replacements was not about to allow the baby of the family to tackle a task that we’d been warned was about to get messy.

Three of us made it to the water’s edge. I stood back and took notes. That was my job.

The sister with the two hip replacements really stepped up to the plate at this point. She got the lids off the urns while perched on a rock. She remembered to bring an old towel to kneel on.

The real problems began.

Those movies where Grandpa’s urn gets knocked over and the contents hoovered up in a vacuum cleaner for comedic effect? Not likely to happen. Funeral homes must have seen those movies too.

The ashes aren’t loose in the urns—they’re stored in clear plastic bags. Indestructible bags. Bags taped shut with indestructible tape. And we were standing on the side of the river in a semi-remote location, with no sharp objects to unseal the bags.

I suggested my sister use her teeth, but after a bit of debate, we decided to save that as a last resort.

Ten minutes later, the bags were open (no teeth required) and the next problem manifested itself. We’d been told to get the opened bags really close to the surface of the water before dumping them, or we’d be wearing a lot of Dad and/or his wife home. The wind was in our favor, so at least there was comfort in that.

Mixing ashes that are roughly the amount and consistency of flour from two separate five-pound bags took phenomenal coordination on the part of the sister with the two hip replacements. She regretted not bringing a Tyvek coverall, but she’d worried it might make it look like a crime scene and left it at home.

Halfway through mixing and scattering she encountered a new problem. One urn had a large lump inside it that was blocking the neck. We debated tossing the urn into the water and calling it a day, but someone said those urns were worth eight hundred dollars apiece, and none of us are getting younger. Rather than litter, we should reuse and recycle.

We found a stick and unclogged the urn. The clog turned out to be more plastic bags, because when the urn is half empty is apparently the point where people decide to split up their loved one’s ashes and everyone takes a bit home. That’s the only reason we could see as to why those bags were there.

But those people weren’t us.

The final dip.

Dad truly would have enjoyed it. He loved the outdoors and the water.

However, even though she was careful, by the end of it, the sister with the hip replacements was wearing her take-home bag’s worth of ashes, and we all got to breathe some of them in.

The dipping itself (minus the bag-opening gala) took fifteen minutes. That was when we discovered how underprepared we really were, and what, in retrospect, we wish we’d known.

Bring (biodegradable) hand soap and make sure there’s plenty of water. You’re going to need it.

Scattering of ashes, the final assessment.

My dad would have been happy that we were all there together.

I remain in favour of cremation, and those are my instructions for when my time comes. I haven’t put much thought into it beyond that. I don’t think I’ll ask for my ashes to be scattered, though. They can be buried. I’m not fussy where.

And while I understand that those urns are expensive, and I’m good if my family decides to reuse and recycle, they might want to pause and ask themselves if getting me out of the urn is really worth the eight hundred dollars.