Sudden death is something that happens in sports, is it hockey or basketball? It might be both, I know it’s a type of overtime, but it has another meaning as well. Sudden death is terrifying. Sudden death is traumatic. Sudden death will grab you by the soul and shake you until everything you’ve ever been falls out and you’re left an empty shell, broken and sobbing on the floor, trying to remember how to be human, wishing you could become pavement.
Sudden death has entered my life before, when my dad died in 2012. Sudden death is different than planned death, though both have their own horrors and can be terrible to witness, to experience. I’m speaking only from the living side; I have no idea what it’s like to die.
Planned death has its own set of terrors. The sinking knowledge that it’s coming, delivering the news to loved ones that a life is coming to an end, staying by someone’s side through hospice, making choices, plans, picking out a funeral home, a burial plot. When my dad died, he collapsed at home and was revived by paramedics en route to the hospital. Initially, we had hoped that he would recover. After days in the cardiac ICU, we learned that his brain no longer showed any signs of functioning. Unfortunately, he had prepared a living will with an attorney months beforehand that left us no choices, and he was taken off life support.
For months after he died, I was furious at him, particularly that he had the initiative to write the damn documents that would lead us to end his life. I was angry he had left us so early, far sooner than I wanted and before he got to enjoy his retirement and time with his grandchildren, as he planned. I wanted more time with him, and I felt robbed of the years I had expected to have with him. Now, a decade later and after being with friends while their own parents deteriorated and moved into nursing and assisted living homes and eventually hospice, I now have better perspective on the way he left this world. He would never have wanted to become sick and frail, to let people nurse him and see him come undone in the ways many elderly people do.
How embarrassing, to get old, to have a body that betrays you, to die. I resented him for his sudden death and swift departure, now I understand that he wanted it that way. That even though it was horrible for us to experience, maybe it was better.
Confronting death is uncomfortable. We hide it from view, people die in hospital rooms or nursing homes, not on the street, not in front of our eyes, not in the backyard. We turn away, we don’t look. Like birth, we only see it on tv, never in person. It’s the kind of thing you do behind closed doors. You don’t invite death into your living room.
When my husband died, it was an extreme shock. We had been careening through a divorce, and I had been sprinting toward a future where we were separate, apart. I was terrified, and was about to go no contact after being repeatedly told by loved ones that it was time for me to file a restraining order. The shock of his death left me hollow, my ears ringing and my vision blurry for days, unable to function or focus or do anything other than lay on the floor.
His family was adamant that they needed to see his body. They left me voicemails (I was not answering the phone) furious and hostile that I didn’t immediately choose a funeral home and arrange a viewing for them. It had been nearly a decade since he had seen or spoken to his mother and sister. I didn’t understand why they adamantly and immediately needed to see his corpse.
I found myself on the phone with a terminally ill friend. A professional event director who had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer, she was the obvious choice when it came time to plan things. She sat on my couch and calmly guided me through it. I held my hanky and my clipboard with a fresh sheet of paper and tried to take notes. She brought her death plans folder. She suggested the funeral home that she had chosen for herself, a neighborhood place that had an option for “green” cremation. She assured me she’d done her research and it was a good place. We went together to the appointment.
We sat across from a mortician that was the opposite of what I was expecting. In my mind, morticians are elderly white men, balding with white hair that’s fluffy along their ears, spectacles and a kind, mumbling, grandfatherly manner. But this was a 30-something woman named Miranda. She had a short pixie cut and a wicked sense of humor. We laughed/cried through that meeting, and she gently guided me through the plans. We arranged for the viewing for his family. My friend volunteered to go to my house and locate his wedding suit, the one he always joked he would be buried in. Funny how unfunny that is now.
We had never written a will, so his final wishes were scrawled on a piece of notebook paper he left in a sealed envelope next to him. In it, he told how much his life had been blessed, how much he loved me, how much he loved the children, how he was sure that his death would be the best thing that ever happened to us. He asked that we not hold any funeral or remembrance.
I immediately discounted those instructions. We had owned a store and had a massive group of friends and a community that were just as shaken by his death as those closest to me were. There was never any chance of not having a service. I choose a venue and made the arrangements.
“How many people do you think will come?” It’s a fun game when you’re young to imagine who will come to your funeral. It’s a different exercise entirely when you have to actually gauge how many attendees there will be. We planned for a 100, but ended up adding chairs and even then, it was standing room only. I didn’t feel terribly conflicted about it, knowing it wasn’t what he wanted. A funeral is for the living, and these people needed to pay their respects.
His father and step-mom did not come for the funeral, but called and asked if I would like to have the burial plot at the cemetery that they owned. After his brother died in 2008, they bought the plot next to his. They wanted me to have it, if I wanted. I couldn’t think of a better place to lay him to rest.
Again, his sister came for me, claws extended. She screeched at me that I was going against his wishes, that she’d had a conversation with him 30 years prior and he had wanted his ashes scattered in the Mississippi River.
I was against it. To this day, I do not know where my dad’s ashes are or if my step-mother still has them, if they were scattered somewhere or maybe even buried. It’s possible she threw them away. I wanted my husband to have a grave, to have a place the kids and I can visit. Who was she to say what he would have wanted? The last time they spoke was 2016. She was furious at me and vicious and cutting with her words, but to me it made sense that he would be laid to rest next to their brother. He loved visiting the cemetery and had chosen that grave. It was the obvious place. I calmly explained to her that it’s illegal and unsanitary to scatter human remains in the river. She hasn’t spoken to me since.
I called the cemetery. The people who work in death services are truly incredible. The way they answer the phone, their curt “I’m so sorry”’s. The peace of no questions asked. People who do the work of answering the phone and locating the plot of land you’re going to lay your husband in, the people who quote you the price for an urn vault, and then explain to you what an urn vault is while you quietly sob, are some of the kindest I have ever encountered. They are doing hard work and I’m grateful for them.
We took our last ride together. After the service, I picked up his remains from the funeral home and drove them to the cemetery, a little compact box in the passenger seat of my car. I didn’t bring his ashes to the funeral, I told everyone he hadn’t wanted to have a service so I didn’t invite him. I didn’t want his presence there. I didn’t want him anywhere near me.
I didn’t want him in my car, either, but there was no other way. Who do you call to pick up and transport your husband’s earthy remains? Some things only a widow can do.
I was prepared for it, and after I was handed the surprisingly heavy box, I belted it into the front passenger seat and addressed him directly, as if he were there.
“I’m picking the music.” He hated being in my car, he always commented on how low it was and difficult it was to get in and out of. He hated that I always wanted to play spotify through my Bluetooth connection instead of the CDs and cassette mixes he made for me and left on my seat. He wasn’t able to speak up or object, so I drove him across town to his final resting place playing all of my favorite songs that he hated. The pop punk and emo he couldn’t stand, cranked up and windows open, singing/crying at the top of my lungs.
I arrived at the cemetery and met with a man who was waiting to show me a selection of urns and urn vaults, a device that seemed to be a plain metal box that the urn goes inside. It seemed silly to me, until the nice man explained that it’s to prevent the ground from caving in. I imagined it, graves caving into the grass, and understood why it was a requirement. I chose the plainest wood box they had.
I asked uncomfortably how the remains (“cremains,” he corrected me) would be transferred from the cardboard box into the urn and whether or not there would be anything else in the box or just the ashes. I did not want to be the one to do it. The man explained he could transfer them from the container to the urn, and then asked if I was ok with him opening the box to see if they were already in a plastic bag, as was customary. He asked if I wanted to keep it in the plastic or not, and I chose not.
As he opened the box, he gasped. I looked at him with alarm. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” I could hear my heart beating in my ears.
“I don’t believe you. You gasped.”
“No really, it’s nothing.”
“Sir, you’re going to have to tell me why you just gasped or I’m going to wonder about this moment for the rest of my life.”
He chuckled. “I’m sorry, it’s just….the color is off.” He pulled the plastic bag from the box and set it before us on the table. You would think someone who works at the cemetery would be better at not gasping in surprise in front of the bereaved. Before us was a plastic bag filled with what looked like white dust.
“What color is it supposed to be?”
I don’t think I was prepared for this conversation and don’t know how I felt about suddenly being immersed in it. I had never considered what color cremains were supposed to be.
“Usually, they’re grey. Like ash. But these are so white.”
“Why?”
I stared at him, awaiting an answer. The silence lasted so long.
“I don’t know.”
If he didn’t know, I surely didn’t either. He gathered my documents and payment and took the paperwork to another room to make photocopies. He took my credit card and the cremation certificate. When he returned, he had the answer.
“I figured it out, it’s because it was a green cremation.” That information meant nothing to me. I had chosen it because of my friend, but also because had been a fierce environmentalist. I assumed he would have concurred it was the best choice.
“What does that mean?” I asked him cautiously. At some point I need to become less curious.
“Normally, during cremation, the body is incinerated. This is done….differently. With chemicals, I think.”
“So, his body wasn’t burned, it was…melted? With chemicals?”
I have no idea what kind of emotion my face conveyed. I was in far too deep and was ready to leave this conversation, this place, this timeline, this planet.
He must have noticed my face because he turned the conversation around. “Something like that, we don’t need to go into the details. I’m glad we solved the mystery.”
Yes, I’m glad we solved the mystery. I left his white powder remains in the capable hands of the cemetery man. On a sunny day at the end of July, we stood with my closest friends and my father-in-law and his wife, and lowered the box into the ground next to his brother.
It's so interesting how we all have different ideas about death and endings and how it should go. My sister-in-law died unexpectedly at age 27, and it was SO hard for everyone to reconcile what they thought was "right" vs. what we could afford vs. what we thought she'd want... not to mention doing it all while grieving. I'm glad that with time you've come to understand your Dad's decision a bit more. We totally have things in place that lay out what we do/don't want done to try to take the burden of those decisions off our or families. Ugh. Death just sucks.