The Weight
Out of the Ashes
This past week, Sam and I flew out to California to put our friend Doug to rest.
On a sunny afternoon in Palo Alto, we arrived at our destination: the Alta Mesa Memorial Park. Barbara, Doug’s widow, drove us- if I’m to be honest- excruciating slowly in her 28-year-old Volvo. In the main office, we were directed to Doug’s interment spot, set in one of many bricked walls on the property, all peppered with vaults where ashes are placed.
We walked for some distance, leading Barbara and her cane along a poorly-marked detour around a construction site for a new mausoleum to the wall where Doug’s name plate had been set. Earlier, Barbara and I had stopped at Trader Joe’s for flowers, a dozen red roses, and cut them down so that they fit into one of the gilt clip-on vases Alta Mesa provided.
I was the only one of the three of us tall enough to place Doug’s ashes in the vault, so a cemetery worker handed the rectangular cardboard box of Doug to me. His ashes had a weight to them, a fact I found both surprising and the opposite of surprising. Slide the box all the way to the back, I was instructed, and I did. It felt remote, surreal. Though his death and our shared sorrow and grief are as real as it gets, this moment felt like watching a movie of myself doing this odd thing, stretching up as far as I could reach to place my sweet incinerated friend, whose voice I can still hear, whose kindnesses I will never forget, into a steel-lined cubbyhole in a wall.
Did you ever imagine, when you first met Doug, all those years ago, that you would someday be doing this? Barbara asked. Of course I had not. But when it happens, you do the thing that is required. You take the box, you slide it to the back of the vault. There will be time to reflect on its meaning later, but in the moment, you have only the dream state, punctuated by the weight of the ashes in your hand.