The Scattering

This blog post was guest written by my friend George Hofmann. George writes the newsletter "Practicing Mental Illness."

Down the hill just out of reach beyond a black, cast-iron fence still lays a cigarette, dusty, flicked without thought or respect into a pile of ashes, as if someone chain smoked pack after pack and tossed all thoughts of the past onto the heap. Although it has become the same color as the grey fanning over it and out across the hill it stands out, like nagging thoughts of things you should have done that you can’t push away. Guilt over someone else’s carelessness. That one thing you’ll never escape. All that remains among the remains. This is where ghosts come from.

The cemetery is such a well-ordered space that something out of place just glares at you as it breaks the peace, the silence, of the columns of dead. One after another, immobile, but drawing us back into a timeless past upon which we write the history and we choose what to inscribe on the granite that lasts longer than that history, till a time comes when no one cares anymore, and the earth takes it all back.

The scattering garden is different. It sits upon a hill that would overlook the graveyard, but a circle of trees conceals it. Evergreens, so the place is always shaded and always tucked away. There are two tables of granite off to the side, crowded with the names and dates of those scattered there. A third will be added soon, so many lives have ended and rested on that slope. Birds sing in the trees unseen, and the sound of traffic from somewhere off to the left is overtaken by the wind that makes the trees sway, but does not lift any ashes from the ground. Like the lives lived the ashes scattered here are not unform, at least not up close. But the black iron rail keeps you away, and it all looks the same, except for the time when the bag is held and the arms outstretch and empty all that is left onto the charnel on the hill.

Some would say this is just throwing the dead away. It’s not a remembered place like the ocean or a hiking trail or off the last row of the stadium of a favorite sports team. It’s contrived. It’s a built garden reserved for disposal, but with a bit more dignity and a place to come and visit and reflect. A beautiful place. The flowers and shrubs, the trees and the ribbon of sky that peaks through, and yes, the heaps of cremated remains that dive off deeply onto a patch of exposed earth where grass no longer grows.

Others would say here we don’t throw away the dead at all. Instead, we release them into consciousness where all are joined indistinguishable from one another, in the image of some unnamed god, sent back into the fabric from which we all came. This is a sharp contrast to the rest of the cemetery, with its insistent distinction of one plot from another, standing out alone with markers to prove it, and no doubt of who lies there. The scattering garden is a common grave for people secure with being common people. The ashes merge together with the souls risen and the memories swirl and while the culture may scream “me!” the dead know better. The dead are all one. It is the living that makes each stand out.

The living come in groups to the scattering garden. One is chosen, usually the groundskeeper, to open the urn and empty the bag inside. Overt religious services are rare here, but words are always spoken. Most people think they are more profound, more notable, than they truly are. But in these small groups they are notable indeed. Whereas, like the ash, we all kind of blend together into some secure irrelevance to the broader world, to these groups of loved ones, right up to the point of release, we are spectacular. Today, in the bitter cold, a widower stood with his collar raised and his eyes tearing as he leaned into the wind. His wife did routine work but in new, unusual, sometimes remarkable ways. He spoke of an early mentor who saw the way she did things and said, “you can’t do that. It’s not normal.” He said of his wife, “but she was not normal. She was better than that.” 

The groundskeeper held the bag just above the lip of the hill and poured out the remains gently, so that none would take to the air and cling to the widower’s long coat. Tonight, at home, his wife does cling to him. As does a flake or two of ash just beside the left lapel of his coat. By instinct he raises his arm to brush it away, and then realizes what he is doing and stops. He sits on the bed, falls over, and sleeps in the coat. In the morning he rises, first thought of his wife. On the way to make coffee, as he always did for her, he stops in front of the mirror in the hall. His coat is disheveled and the ash is gone.

As the sun rises the groundskeeper scales the fence and moves across the hill of the scattering garden with a rake. The little piles are evened out and a bit of dirt is mixed in to keep it all down. Midday there’ll be another family. The groundskeeper notices the cigarette and moves to rake it under, then stops. He picks it up and puts it in his pocket to take very far from here. We will be judged by the way we treat our dead and the places we leave them. What we learn from them, and how we bring them back.

My Mother and the Sea

This week’s Cemetery Traveler post was guest written by my friend, Cynthia Solem. - Ed Snyder 

My Mother and the Sea

My mother, Violet, was born in Philadelphia. On her mother’s side of the family, she was a seventh generation Philadelphian, as she was descended from the Krefelders, the founders of Germantown. Her father was the son and grandson of German immigrants to Pennsylvania.

Photo below:  Alice Marker Robinson and children:  Alyce, Violet, and Ray, Wildwood, New Jersey(?), Circa 1933. (Family archives)

Alice Robinson and children, c. 1933

Violet’s father, like his father, worked at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. My mother, along with her two siblings, spent her early childhood in South Philly, in a neighborhood for shipyard workers. During the Depression, this was an excellent job to have, as Grandpa had a steady income. One of my grandmother’s relatives had a beach house at Wildwood, New Jersey, and, when he was about to lose it for unpaid taxes, my grandparents bought it. For the next several years, my mother’s favorite place was Wildwood in the summer. My grandmother, as befitting her Pennsylvania Dutch origins, was a neatnik, but she relaxed the rules at the beach. My mother and her sister and brother were given a lot of freedom to go to the beach and the Boardwalk. As a teenager, my mother became friends with several lifeguards, and, after they got off duty, they would all go out to swim with the dolphins.  For my mother, the ocean always symbolized freedom.

World War II intervened and spoiled this lovely family time. My mother (who had by this time changed her name to the more-modern Vicki) joined the Cadet Nurse Corps, and studied at Presbyterian Hospital to get her nursing degree. My uncle joined the Navy. Aunt Alyce took a job as personal secretary to the head of a department store. (Strawbridge and Clothier’s) but still found time to attend USO dances. At one dance, she met two nice Army sergeants from Wisconsin who were about to be shipped off to North Africa. She invited them home for Thanksgiving dinner. My mother was studying for exams, but Alyce was very persuasive and said it was her patriotic duty to take these young men, who might die, after all, on a tour of the City of Brotherly Love. One of the young men, Bob, was apparently quite smitten by Vicki, who had just turned eighteen. He asked if he could write her, and she agreed.

Bob was sent to North Africa, contracted malaria, was part of the invasion of Sicily, was sent to a hospital in England to recover, then was sent to Omaha Beach during D-Day. He had a relapse, and then was sent back to hospitals in New Jersey, Florida, and Colorado. Bob was a good letter writer, and apparently a persuasive man because, even though he didn’t really know her, he eventually got my mother to promise to marry him and move to, as she put it, “the wilds of Wisconsin."  My mother, a big city girl, was quite out of place in the small Wisconsin town where they lived first with my father’s parents and then in a trailer park for returning GIs on the University of Wisconsin‘s Camp Randall Field.

My brother was born and my mother took the baby to meet his Pennsylvania relatives. My Philadelphia grandfather was ecstatic about having a grandson, but he didn’t have long to enjoy him because Grandpa died shortly after, at 54, of a massive heart attack.

My grandmother sold the beach cottage and the family home and moved to Wisconsin to live with us.

Every summer, Grandmom went to Ocean City, to visit my uncle and his family, and to Wildwood. She faithfully sent her Midwestern grandchildren salt water taffy.  Our family joined her a number of times and my brother and I learned to body surf and love the sea, just as our mother did.

My father died young, so my mother was widowed at forty-two. I asked her if she wanted to move back to the East Coast, but she had a family, a job, and friends in Wisconsin. As she got older, she was adamant that she did not want to be buried with my dad and the rest of his family at the family grave in Spring Green, Wisconsin. “I want you to scatter my ashes off the shore at Cape May,” she said.

Though my mother lived another forty-six years, it was still a shock when she died last year. Though she hadn’t left any written instructions, my brother and I both knew what her wishes were.

 

Rainbow over Cape May, September 10, 2015 (Photo courtesy of Martha Kendall)

Last summer, our families and two of my cousins and their spouses all gathered at Miss Chris Fishing Center in Cape May. My mother’s ashes were in a cardboard tube decorated with sunflowers. My son’s fiancée had brought a bouquet of flowers. To our surprise, the boat slowed right outside the Boardwalk at Wildwood and the captain told us it was time to begin the ceremony. It was a lovely day and laughing gulls were flying above the boat. My brother tossed the ashes, in their container, off the stern. Then each of us took a flower, made a blessing, and placed the flower in the water. We laughed, cried, and hugged.

Laughing Gull, Wildwood New Jersey, August, 2014 (Cynthia Solem)

My mother, like her mother, was a bird lover. She was particularly fond of cardinals. As our boat turned and headed back to Cape May, we were escorted by one of the laughing gulls.

“I’ve been noticing the birds a lot lately,” one of my sons confided to me. “I thought that maybe Grandma would want a cardinal to be with her, but it’s fitting that a gull has decided to come back with us.”

We live on the other coast, near another Boardwalk, but, when I smell the salt air, and see the gulls and pelicans soaring over Monterey Bay, I cannot help but think that we all came from the ocean. That’s where my mother has returned. ______________________________________________

Author: Cynthia Solem, Santa Cruz, California

Cynthia has lived on the Pacific Coast for over forty years. She has recently retired after teaching English and English as a Second Language at community colleges and universities in the Bay Area and the Monterey Bay area.