Tin Can Dad

My Dad is in a tin can. Well it’s probably not a “tin can”, but steal or aluminum. Years ago it would have been tin, but then again, years ago my father’s ashes would have probably been put in some stately urn. The can is in a square, cardboard box with a brown, wood-like pattern, that doesn’t come close to looking like wood, mostly because it has a dull, porous, newspaper texture. The cardboard box is sitting in a mortuary awaiting me to make final arrangements for internment. It had been a simple choice to opt for cremation, it had been my father’s stated wish, and I hadn’t looked forward to the complexity of an open casket funeral.

A month has passed since his cremation, and I still haven’t made final internment arrangements. I’m still paying the mortuary fees for dad’s cremation, so I doubt they will dump his ashes down the drain, or some other less dignified disposal method. It’s likely I over payed for the cremation, so let them keep dad in storage for a while, they’ll likely find someway to charge an additional handling fee when I get the cemetery pinned down anyway.

It bothers me a little how cheap Dad’s “appropriate container” looks. The line item on “appropriate container” reads $210. It must come from some official can-for-ashes supplier, but it really just looks like a can of assorted nuts. So much so in fact, I can’t imagine that it doesn’t come off the same assembly line of some cans-for-nuts supplier, just painted differently. The mortuary has assured me the “appropriate container” is “state approved”. I guess some state bureaucrat somewhere has assessed it to be capable of holding cremated human remains without excessive leakage or be subject to excessive deterioration in non-extreme environments. Of course, said assessment, probably didn’t involve any actual scientific testing, and in all likelihood consisted of one or two calls to the can factory.

Everybody experiences loss. I feel selfish for using mine as the motivation to write down these words. How many people try to write creatively out of the general population? One in ten? One in a twenty? How many of those feel moved to write something down about their personal loss of a loved one? Probably more than one in ten. Millions of stories and billions of words about loss. Blah, blah, blah. Here are some more.

 Stories should have a point, a plot, some denouement. Maybe this should be the launching point of some non-chronological unfolding of my Dad’s last tragic years. Well none of that this time. This is just a short, late night rambling, in the face of my procrastination in tying up the last few loose ends of my Father’s recent demise.

In some minimal sense, I have finally taken care of my final disposition. His ashes are in transit to the cemetery where his first wife (my mother) are interred. I had to choose between the cemetery with my mom, who had widowed him, and the cemetery with his second wife Jane who had also widowed him. At one point in his life, some years after both had passed away, he told me he had loved Jane more than Gail my mother, and would prefer to be buried next to Jane. I think he regretted telling me this, as not long before he death he said that he thought being buried next to my mother would be more appropriate. I choose the cemetery with my mom not so much to honor his later wish, but because I knew where mom was buried, and didn’t look forward to tracking down Jane’s surviving family to make arrangements. Some other deciding factors were that his mother and father were buried close to my mother, and Jane’s family had pretty much abandoned him after picking his pockets in the wake of Jane’s death. Of course their perspective on getting half of Dad’s house through Jane’s will would be different. I’m sure he could have fought this legally, but that would have been quite out of character for him, as he usually took stoically whatever life threw at him without complaint. I probably should not think ill of Jane’s family, as to be honest they put in a better showing at Dad’s memorial than my cousins and other blood relatives did. After three or four phone calls, the arrangements where finalized to have his remains sent via registered mail. About a pound of postage I guess.

I have to wonder if the postman who delivers the box to the office of the small cemetery in central Illinois, will stop to wonder if there are human remains within. In this case probably not, because I get the impression the cemetery is run as a sideline to a number of other marginal activities needed to get by. It is a very small cemetery in a very small town, hardly a full time concern.

I paid the interment fee today, I still owe some money for dad’s cremation. No headstone yet either. My dad’s departure seems to dribble out in dribs and drabs. I don’t know if I think about his death more or less than average – so probably average.

It has been a couple of months since I last added to this story/diary/confession. I guess I’ve gotten on with my life with what seems like frantic abandon. I guess I now see how little time we all have. I have not thought about losing my dad very much in that time, and now he is back in my thoughts. It is the day after Thanksgiving, the Holiday Season is in full swing. These will be the first holidays I have not spent with my dad. You would think after all the dozens of years spent celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter with my dad, I would have Wonderful uplifting stories to tell about these signposts of life. Well I don’t. They all blur into one bland repetitive series of excuses to eat out. Maybe adding to the monotony of these holiday happenings was that dad and I didn’t really exchange gifts. I bought dad quite a few nice pieces of sound and video equipment, not to mention other necessary items for his home, and could hardly be faulted for being stingy. But these gifts, while often bought in celebration for the holidays, where never wrapped and unwrapped in the usual holiday fashion, but arranged for by phone for delivery as was most convenient for dad, or most often ordered after Christmas had come and gone after dad had figured out what he needed most.

Perhaps I sound petty, perhaps I am leaving the impression that I gave more than I got. I think I would have appreciated some effort on my dads part, if he had gotten me the occasional gift during my adult life, but it wasn’t important to me, and I didn’t really get him anything either when I was a younger. Then dad got sick, and to be honest, gift giving became a salve for a guilty conscious at not doing more for him – like taking him in to live with me and care for him more directly. Now the salve comes in the form of words – how many words are left to write before I feel at peace with memories of my dad?

Another couple of months have come and gone. It is now just turned 2004, almost exactly half a year since my dad’s passing. It had been my intention to really punch this into something really profound, but instead I just feel like conceding that I can’t ever really do my dad’s memory justice. He was a really good man, he deserved a lot more out of life. I’m sure he would want me to be happy, and while I could have done more to make his life easier while he was alive, I will not obsess on missed opportunities. Instead I will thank my good fortune of health and try to be some fraction of as good a person as he was.