Ashes

My father was a scientist and it was only fitting that he continued to be a part of scientific research in death and we gladly donated his body to science. He was actually a "resident" of Temple hospital and I was working as the Food and Beverage manager for the Health Science campus at Temple University. My office was directly across the street so every day I would walk from my parking spot, past the hospital, and wave to Dad. Typical dark and morbid Czech humor, my father would have loved that.

The last night I saw him was a Thursday, I came, as usual after work. I held his hand, sang to him and read excerpts from Winnie the Pooh. He would squeeze my hand and occasionally say a word but for the most part he was silent and in and out of awareness. I told him that it was alright for him to go, that we would be okay. My father always had difficulty saying "I love you", we eventually trained him to use the ASL hand sign and I got one of those on my way out. I made sure to say "I love you" in that moment but there had never been a doubt of that between us. When someone is in hospice a part of you recognizes that the time is ticking down but we never can know when that last moment will be. The denial part of us always says, "I'll get one last time", rather than understand the finality that you facing.

The following day, Friday, I was planning on going after work but got caught much longer than I expected and by the time I got out it was too late to go see him. After dinner, which he never ate, he would be fast asleep and I went home, made beef bourguignon and mashed potatoes to bring to him the next day for lunch and went to sleep. I missed the call from the nurse at 1:30am telling me that he had died and woke up at 5:30am to a text from my brother saying that Dad was gone. The shoe had finally dropped. My first thought was one of relief. it's the ultimate contradiction of feelings. That was my last rational thought for a long time.

I spoke with Sherry first, who told me that she had been there to greet the medical team that comes to collect the body to be donated and I was glad of that. She told me that she took pictures of their hands together. Her alive hand entwined with his lifeless one. I still think that is a powerful moment and I am so glad that she got to be there to see him off. She asked if I would go back to the hospice and pick up a few things left in the room. My second phone call was my brother and we both cried on the call and all we could say was that we were glad he was no longer in pain. He had come out from California and stayed for a while to help get things in order once Dad was moved to hospice but had returned home after several weeks.

Walking into that room was a deeply surreal experience. Where was he? I didn't realize it for a long time but there was a subconscious part of myself that thought of my father as "Missing" rather than dead. His body was gone but I had no proof, the day before I had been holding his hand, how could he just be gone? It didn't make sense. Sherry told me that after his body had been removed she opened up all the windows and shooed his spirit out into the night sky. I decided that I needed to do that too, one last time to make sure that no part of him lingered there in that hospice room. He hated it there and I grew to hate it too. I was in a constant state of rage at the various lapses in care that I witnessed so there was a part of me that was glad that he wasn't stuck there anymore. For one of the most expensive and fancy hospice care centers in the country they really did not do a good job in my opinion. There had been plenty of meltdowns after visits and times that I would flip out at the staff having found my father undressed and half fallen out of bed, uncheck for extended amounts of time. Once I purposefully set off the alarm that was mean to tell if a patient had fallen out of bed, as my father was an accomplished faller, and for the entire time I was there no one came to check. You can imagine how well I reacted when I "calmly and politely" spoke with the nurse on my way out...not at all like a monster ready to rip them all to shreds.

As a Jew I do know that the one constant, no matter the issue at hand, is food. Fortunately I had a big pot of stew and mashed potatoes ready to bring to the house. That morning on the phone with Sherry she was trying to figure out what to feed the immediate family who were coming to the house. I chimed in and said, "I just so happen to have a full meal ready to bring for everyone." It felt very clandestine that I would be cooking the night that my father died. Some of my earliest memories were of making bread with him. Measuring flour and kneading dough on the kitchen countertop. It felt very full circle. That Saturday was just the family and then the next day we had a full day of sitting Shiva and the house was full the entire day with people. I sat in my dad's library with my friends who came to sit with me and we looked at pictures all day. I have thousands and thousands of photographs and huge photo albums and scrap books. What a treasure. We did not do a ceremony, we found ceremony and memorial methods that felt right to us. My father would not have wanted a traditional funeral, he was not religious or spiritual and would have hated a somber service of any kind. We had a table covered in memorabilia, documents, poems, pictures, all manner of "Ephemera" - as we like to call the endless culmination of long life of collecting - and sitting on the table was a candle and a bell and every time someone read something or looked at something they would ring the bell and we would all "Smile for Dad". This is still going on to this day. That was the right way for us to mourn.

After that it would be over 2 years until we got the ashes back from the medical unit that had his body. Covid of course caused a delay though we had been warned it could take up to 2 years for any remains to be returned to us. I at first didn't think I would mind but ended up having a strange sense of limbo. I knew he was gone but a part of me was still circling the question of "Where are you?" His estate also took an incredibly long time to be fully settled despite it being rather straight forward. Everything seemed to to take an inordinate amount of time to accomplish and it was also 2 years of waiting, filing, refiling, more waiting. It seemed like it would never end. I grew to hate this sense of waiting. It was a tether to grief that I didn't want. I didn't want to still be in this stage of waiting for the end anymore and it chipped away at my mind endlessly. I realize that I was putting way too much thought into these formalities but we are conditioned to put meaning in symbols and ceremony as a way to contain death. A futile endeavor but we try anyway. There was a time where we were not sure that we were going to get any ashes back. The medical unit was having trouble locating the remains and I was on pins and needles with anxiety. "How can you lose my father!?!' I wanted to scream.

Fortunately they located them and shipped them to us. I haven't done anything with them yet. They are sitting in a box on my windowsill but I have to admit that I am glad to have them. I also like to light a candle and look at pictures or go through the boxes of ephemera that I have in my possession now. I do want to spread some ashes in the gardens of Chanticleer, which was such a special place for us. There are a few other locations that I would like to go to, special places from my childhood that were just for my Dad and me and special places for me, Dad and Sherry. I even want to sneak back to the house they lived in for 18 years and spread him in the garden there that he loved so much but don't tell anyone. I didn't realize how much ash a human body would leave behind. I have plenty to scatter and I know my dad would get a kick out of my antics.