We are following two black-suited undertakers across the one-hundred-degree parking lot out to a windowless metal building—my dad, Charlie, Amelia, me. John is at work, our kids at school. It is the day before the memorial service. My phone is buzzing in my pocket with texts of flight arrivals and last-minute arrangements.
We are all frazzled by the heat and the events of the past week, but I almost certainly look the most haggard. The hair on my head is just starting to fill in. My T-shirt sags off my body on the surgery side. I move slowly. The next three months of chemo is scheduled to start the following week.
“Dammit,” my mom said a few weeks ago. “I can’t believe I’m going to die right when you’re in the middle of all this. It’s killing me.” One of her wry smiles.
The bulk of me is standing here in grief—in that unhinged and unpredictable way we are led toward things after a loss—but I have to admit that part of me is here for some kind of morbid test drive, death hitching a ride in my chest from my mom’s sickbed to this parking lot behind the funeral home.
In the far back corner, in the corrugated metal building: the crematorium. The Uglification of America, my mom used to say when she would see this sort of cheap metal structure going up along some rural North Carolina highway, quickly announcing itself as a Dollar General or a liquor store. Now, inside one, her body awaits its final moments.
We know they’ll have her in the hundred-dollar cardboard cremation casket we’d picked out at the funeral home. What we don’t expect is that it will look like a large white cake box.
The morticians seem uncertain about us for wanting to be here—like it’s we who are the creepy ones. Honestly, I’m not sure we want to be here either, but Charlie feels strongly that we should see this through to the end, and we have agreed to try to support each other through whatever twists and turns our mother’s death takes us.
We kept vigil at her bedside until she died. We kept her body in the house for several days after she was gone—taking turns sitting with her, watching her change and become increasingly less her.
And now.
This is the end, I think to myself.
*
Three days earlier we’d sat in the funeral home office with a different mortician—our next-door neighbor, Joe, a friend and the new father of a baby girl born the week my mom died—and asked about observing the cremation.
“Uh, sure, that can definitely be arranged,” Joe said. Two of his great gifts: tact and kindness.
On the glossy mahogany table in the funeral parlor was the flowered canister we’d brought from home—her stash can. “And can you put her ashes in this?” Charlie asked. “Sorry—it has kind of a strong smell. It’s where she kept her pot.”
“Oh, definitely,” said Joe, nodding without blinking. “Not a problem.”
I was actually relieved this was the container we’d shown up with. When I’d picked up my dad for the funeral home appointment, he climbed into my car holding the orange Tupperware pitcher we’d been mixing powder lemonade in since the 1970s. “Will this work?” he’d asked.
“I don’t think so, Dad,” I’d said. “Maybe something—not from the kitchen?”
When he ran back inside to get a different vessel, I’d snapped a photo of the pitcher sitting in the passenger seat and texted it to my mom’s number. “Please come back,” I’d written. “Dad wants to put you in this.”
The first of a million nonreplies.
*
Inside the Uglification of America, it is one hundred degrees hotter than the hundred-degree parking lot. It looks like a garage, with a large cooler and even larger oven. The oven is, it seems, preheating.
“Do you want to see the body first?” one of the undertakers asks us.
She’s been in their refrigerator for five days. There is a sheet covering her face when they lift the cake box lid. Of the whole thing, I like that part the least. The undertaker pulls it back with some fanfare, and the four of us lean forward and peer in at her.
She is no longer my mother—and that, I think, is part of what I’m supposed to understand by visiting her here in the metal box. Although I knew it already. I knew it the moment my phone rang at 3:00 a.m. and Charlie said, “I think you should come,” and I knew it when I skidded into the driveway and a startled rabbit in the grass by the gate stared back at me—unflinching, unmoved—as I slammed the car door and ran past it. I knew I was too late.
She isn’t decomposed or anything like it, but her coloring is distinctly orange and waxy now, and her face is covered in beads of condensation. Only her hair looks like her—lovely wisps of graying brown swept back from her forehead. The purple flowers we’d strewn on her the morning she died are wilted and browning like a discarded corsage. Her eyes are sewn shut—uneven stitches between her eyelashes that look like the doll dresses she helped me sew in third grade. Her mouth is sewn shut as well.
“She would definitely not like that!” I whisper to my dad. He squeezes my shoulder.
The other undertaker turns to my dad. “Do you want to press the button for the incinerator?” he asks, as though my dad is the birthday boy at a special party. He starts showing him the levers and the different dials. My dad, who is usually game for just about anything but who I can tell in this moment is going along with the undertaker’s shtick just to avoid further interaction, presses the green button.
The oven door starts to open and then lurches suddenly, and someone else’s leftover ashes plume briefly into the air like a thought bubble or a dream about how little we belong here. We all jump back, and I can almost hear my mom yelling at my dad, “Jesus Christ, Peter—what are you trying to do to me?”
When the door fully opens, they close the box and slide it in on a short conveyer belt, and the oven door clanks shut with my mom inside. There is no window. Somehow all this time I had imagined there would be a horrifying little window like on a potbelly stove. There is only a thick metal door and she is on the other side of it and we cannot enter and she will not return.
The cremation itself will take four or five more hours to complete.
“Okay, I’m good,” I say almost immediately. I’m light-headed and annoyed at whatever made me think this might be a reasonable thing to do. Outside, I need to squat down on my knees on the blacktop while my eyes adjust to the sun. My dad comes out with me and rubs my back. Charlie and Amelia stay inside a few minutes longer, but soon emerge.
Charlie is ten years younger than I am—my parents’ second wind, a reversed vasectomy. Growing up, he and I never really fought with each other, or with our dad—it wasn’t part of the architecture of our childhood—but we all fought a lot with our mom. For a long time, that was what Charlie and I had in common. Me, maybe, because I’m so much like her—impulsive, demanding, emotional. Charlie, maybe, because he is her opposite: He can be hard to connect with, and she sometimes took that personally.
“Sorry about that,” says Charlie, cry-laughing, Amelia leaning her head against him as we all walk arm-in-arm back to the car. “I don’t know if that was okay or horrible.”
“It was okay,” says my dad. “Let’s just not ever do it again.”