A Sacred Moment Blog

After four years, we finally buried Dean’s ashes.

We’d gotten used to having him around. Nova called him “the manager of the cupboard.” This is the cupboard in our office where we keep ashes, also known as cremains or cremated remains. Poured into heavy-duty plastic bags, they are then tucked inside sturdy plastic urns that are labeled with the late person’s name and birth and death dates.

Usually urns arrive and depart from our cupboard quickly, carried out to cars by grieving family members and friends.

If they’ve never carried cremains before, they are often stunned that it feels like bearing a five-pound bag of sugar. The weighty ashes then travel to their final resting place or places—perhaps divided among kin, interred in a cemetery, or scattered at the decedent’s favorite spot. Some cremains are used to create jewelry and coral reefs.

Not so with Dean, or as we called him, “poor Dean.” He died with no one in his life to decide what to do with his ashes. He was born in 1933 and died in 2010; that’s basically what we knew about him, because his death certificate was full of “unknowns.” He’d lived in an adult family home, under the direction of a professional guardianship service that instructed us to handle his cremains.

Well, we just kept him. Lindsay came to see him as “foundational,” since he came to us right after we opened our office in south Everett. He’d started out with us, so he was part of our family, and we thought he needed one. We often talked about carrying his urn across the highway to scatter his ashes around Silver Lake, but it never happened.

Instead Dean stayed, day after day. Nova imagined him greeting other people’s cremains and then bidding them goodbye, perhaps with a bit of purpose and meaning he never found in life. She told herself this, anyway, especially during those times when all the other urns would vanish, embraced by loving arms, and Dean would be alone, again.

We knew we had to do something. We couldn’t keep Dean in limbo forever. Finally we had an occasion, the launching of A Sacred Moment’s new website, and so we decided to include Dean’s final disposition.

Scattering Ashes

Ideas got tossed around at a meeting. We could have a party that involved a Washington state ferry; we could scatter his ashes in the waters of Puget Sound if we went on a fun outing to Port Townsend. It would be a way, Lucinda pointed out, to educate people about this wonderful service provided free of charge by our state ferry system. When you pre-arrange it, a ferry will actually stop to give families time to release biodegradable urns in the water.

Another idea was to have the celebration at Char’s house in Kenmore, where we could have a little memorial service in the backyard, scattering ashes for Dean there.

Char has the perfect yard for someone’s cremains, full of attractive trees and flowers and whimsical artwork, but she had to clear the interment with her husband George, who has learned over the years not to be surprised by her ideas. She explained to him that she didn’t intend to bury a whole body in their yard, because that, of course, was against the law, but that cremains were perfectly legal on private property. He finally agreed with her assurance that this stranger’s ashes wouldn’t go right next to his parents’ ashes, which were still in urns, but one day might like going into the pretty yard too. It griped him a little that some old guy named Dean was first.

Soon Char went into full-bore party mode; in another life, in fact, she ran a side business called Celebrations by Char, so we knew to just stand back. While she planned the menu, decorations, party favors, and objects to put on Dean’s grave, we did some detective work.

To be respectful, and make his service more meaningful, we wanted to know more about Dean. We hit a dead-end at first when we remembered the wrong guardian service; both the assistant and boss had never heard of the man. This was very Dean-like and dispiriting. However, after retrieving his death certificate from storage, we learned the right guardianship service and called them. The staff there couldn’t recall anything about Dean, but put Lucinda in touch with his former social worker named Sharon.

Sharon did remember Dean, but admitted that she hadn’t learned much about him because visitors annoyed him. He liked quiet and solitude as he watched television around the clock, preferring shows involving cops and lawyers. His favorite program was Law and Order, and he loved Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies. He invited her to sit down and chat only once, when he was anxious about an upcoming surgery.

Meanwhile Nova did some research online, and found three families with his surname currently listed in his Wisconsin hometown, which she saw on his death certificate. When Nova eyed various dates, she noticed a female born in 1926; possibly this was Dean’s older sister. Because there were so many family members, Nova surmised that he probably still had relatives living there. But it really wasn’t our place to try to contact them; that had been the role of others before us, and he’d obviously chosen to be alone. Still, we thought about them, wondering what they knew.

Celebrating Dean

Soon it was party time, a warm, beautiful September evening. Those gathered in the backyard were Lucinda, me, Nova with her husband Mike, Lindsay with her husband Sam, and Char and George with Bindi, our staff comfort dog attired in a sparkly, Elizabethan ruff party collar.

As Char handed out slushy, tasty rum drinks topped with little paper umbrellas, we decided to fetch and open a beer for Dean since he’d been a German from Wisconsin. A bottle of New Belgium Rampant was placed on the outdoor table next to his urn, amidst containers of pansies to plant on his grave and a bag of Chips Ahoy! Char passed the bag around, urging us to eat a chocolate chip cookie for Dean, and she gave him one too, placing it on top of his urn.

Lucinda and I exchanged glances. We’re both off sugar and prefer to consume it in really good stuff, certainly not in a Chips Ahoy!, but we nibbled on them anyway for Dean. I swallowed about a third of mine, hoping nobody was watching and wishing he’d been hooked on dark chocolate.

Then we all looked to Lucinda, who was in charge of the service. (Lucinda is a minister and an old hand at ceremonies, including Lindsay and Sam’s recent wedding.) She related more of what she learned about Dean from Sharon—that he hadn’t been in touch with his family for 60 years, and that since he died at the age of 76, he’d probably struck out alone at 16 in 1949. He’d been a day laborer, probably working hard, living hard, and drinking too much. Alcohol had been a contributing factor in his death.

Lucinda brought out a book called I Died Laughing: Funeral Education with a Light Touch by Lisa Carlson. (Between cartoons, famous last words, and jokes about death, it offers helpful consumer info about the funeral industry.) “I don’t know if Dean liked jokes,” she said, “but since he liked to watch lawyers on TV, I found a lawyer joke.” She asked Lindsay to read the long wind-up aloud; the punch line was that St. Peter could find precious few priests and no lawyers in heaven.

Dean’s social worker, Lucinda went on, related that he was easy-going and rarely complained, but she thought he had given up on life—that there was something very sad about him. So to offer Dean another kind of ending, Lucinda turned to me to read the words she’d selected by the great Sufi poet Hafiz. It was a poem called:

When the Violin

When
The violin
Can forgive the past

It starts singing.

When the violin can stop worrying
About the future

You will become
Such a drunk laughing nuisance

That God
Will then lean down
And start combing you into
His/Her
Hair.

When the violin can forgive
Every wound caused by
Others

The heart starts
Singing.

We continued drinking our rum slushies with the cheery umbrellas. A few yards away, on the perimeter of the yard, Char had stuck a shovel in the ground next to a young, lovely pine tree, indicating where to dig. The rest of us volunteered Sam and then Mike to work the shovel.

We gathered around the hole in the rich brown earth, no more than a foot deep.

Char placed four Chips Ahoy! cookies on top of his ashes, and covered it all with the fresh, newly dug-up earth. Then she positioned his marker, a little tower of rocks that she must have gotten at an upscale nursery during her party shopping. Next she planted the three containers of pansies in a triangle around the marker, and invited us to choose smooth stones to place on the grave too, a kind of supporting cast for the marker with symbols and single words on them: A peace sign, a labyrinth. Remember. Begin Again. Celebrate.

We all stood over it, gazing down. It looked like the homemade grave of someone well-loved. Lucinda offered a final blessing to Dean from a Native American prayer:

Restored in Beauty

The world before me
Is restored in Beauty.
The world behind me
Is restored in Beauty.
The world below me
Is restored in Beauty.
The world above me
Is restored in Beauty.
All things around me
Are restored in Beauty.
It is finished in Beauty.
It is finished now in Beauty.

Goodbye Dean ~ Welcome Renewed Website

We were getting hungry and it was getting dark. Bindi’s festive collar had fallen around her hips, looking like a limp ballet tutu. It was time to go inside the house and celebrate the debut of our bigger and better website. To say bon voyage, Lucinda poured Dean’s unconsumed beer onto his final resting place. — Jan Pollard