When I ‘completed the set’, I found there is no single solution to the worst life can throw at you
My parents are dead and now I don’t know where to spend Christmas. Like, can I go to Dad’s? No. Dad’s is out because Dad now resides on a golf course in Wolverhampton, a golf course that has no official idea about this because when we sprinkled him – a grey, dreary day in February 2004, the first of his birthdays without him – the family neglected entirely to go through any legitimate ash-sprinkling channels, which is why we had to take two cars and sneak down this side road and park nearby, hop through thick grass on a hill, then crouch among thin, leafless trees, passing around the big ice-cream tub that had Dad in it, sprinkling that, and so of course he went everywhere, big billowing clouds of Dad all around us, sticking to boots and trousers, clots of grey Dad on the ground. So: can’t go there.
Mum’s is out, because Mum is a slick of grey dust long since lost to the waves, who was last seen being poured into a shallow hole on a beach in Filey in Yorkshire in 2014. This is another thing they never tell you about death: how, logistically, getting rid of two-and-a-half kilos of ground Mum is a nightmare. Firstly, it is never in an urn: the crematorium presents it to you in a practical-looking if grey-around-the-edges plastic tub, with a plastic bag inside it as rudimentary spill insurance. Then you have to get the old band together again, ie get all the family to one chosen place to reverently pour dust on the ground. My sister did the hard work of organising this one, and we spent two hours in Filey slowly walking down to the beach, digging a small hole, dumping the ashes, finding a bin for the ashes “urn”, then fish and chips and home. Trying to think if I had an emotion that day. Don’t think I had an emotion.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HJyQwx
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