I did an Allhallowtide hike in remembrance of my 3 lost boys, Charlie, Clifton, and Piggy. As part of that, I did a thing I have felt utterly incapable of doing since I received my dog Charlie Bear’s ashes two years ago. Over the last few months, I have acquired two more boxes of ashes after my precious Clifton and then Piggy died. In the wake of their loss, I had created a memorial altar where all three of their engraved wooden boxes of ashes rested, along with their pawprints in clay, Charlie’s dog tags, a tiny teardrop-glazed cup of kitty whiskers saved over the years, a vial of dried Forget-Me-Not flowers, little sunbursts of Piggy and Clifton’s fur pressed in a hanging glass frame, and the same septarian nodule fossil I held against each of them as they passed in my arms and out of this life.
I keep fresh flowers on the altar and light 4 candles on it every night. Having this ritual, along with the physical memorial, has become a great comfort to me. But I have never been able to open the boxes and look at their ashes. This year, however, still in the thick of grieving Clifton and Piggy, I felt a desperate need to do something more to honor all of them and to feel more connected to them. I decided I would open the boxes and put just a little of each of their ashes in 3 small glass specimen vials, and take them to scatter in some place meaningful and holy (hallow) to me.
The process of confronting the ashes filled me with dread. I knew that it would be the most visceral reminder of how truly gone they are, which has been an unbearable absence. I also had some sense of what I thought I would see: a uniformly fine black powder. To assist in the transference of ashes from box to vial, and in the spirit of remembering the dead, I decided to use a tiny silver salt spoon I inherited from my grandmother, which had probably belonged to her mother or grandmother.
I arranged the boxes on my coffee table and began with Clifton’s. When I slid the box open, there was a ziploc bag of pale grey aggregate folded inside. It looked nothing like what I expected. It looked exactly like a handful of beach sand you might scoop up some sunny day, filled with tiny broken shells of all shapes and sizes. The sight of the ashes, holding them in my hands, did bring me to my knees and I wailed and cried and whispered My baby, my baby till I could cry no more. Then when the weeping had exhausted itself, alongside the grief my attention turned to wonder. I put my hand inside the bag and indeed, it felt just like beach sand, and I ran my hands over so many tiny bone shards and what I even thought must be fragments of teeth. His little teeth. His body. My boy. There was more of it there than I had anticipated, more than I thought could survive the fires, and to touch these pieces somehow brought me comfort. I scooped a few tiny spoonfuls of the finer ash into a vial, and then with a larger spoon picked out some of the bigger bone and tooth shards to place in a separate vial on the altar.
I then moved to Piggy’s box. His ashes were darker, but also like beach sand. So, I thought, here is the shore to my ocean of grief. Piggy’s bone fragments were bigger, which made sense. Clifton was tiny, a naturally thin little lion, where Piggy was stocky, thick and big-boned in the way of Russian Blues.
Charlie’s bag of ashes was much larger, also paler, and where the kitties had slivers and shards, Charlie’s fragments were hard white pebbles. Tied to his bag was a blackened metal circle which had gone through the fire, and into which had been stamped the words (none truer), Forever Faithful.Â
For each of them I made a vial of fragments for the altar, in addition to the vials of ashes for scattering. I made small bouquets of marigold and forget-me-nots from the garden, and placed the vials in a velvet-lined box. These I carried with me to the summit of Craggy Pinnacle, one of my favorite vistas, and there I sat for an hour in the sun, accompanied by my friend Anya, who hummed a hymn of grief and blessing when I finally opened the vials and released that small portion of my boys back to the earth— to the wind and the ancient rocks. I whispered words to each of them and the wind took those too, along with my tears, and then my own long exhale.
In our culture that is so rooted in the sickness of death denial, I am grateful to have found my way to days and rituals like this, grateful to the cultures that have long practiced them, from the ancient Aztec rituals that are carried on in Mexico’s beautiful Dia de los Muertos celebrations, to the Roman Catholic All Souls’ Day, to the Hindu and Japanese Buddhist ceremonies honoring departed spirits, as well as the many other Festivals of the Dead practiced around the world.
As we sat on the mountainside, Anya explained to me the incredible jazz funerals of her African and New Orleans heritage, the literal long slow walk through grief and mourning to celebration, in which a jazz-playing marching band leads family and then the greater community. She then suggested we process the day by listening to John Coltrane’s inimitable A Love Supreme in full on the drive home. Though I am abashed to admit that that was my first time listening to it, it also felt like there could not have been a more perfectly suited first time. What a gift.
I ended my words to my boys on the mountain with my favorite Buddhist precept: I do not know, I do not have, I do not understand.
And against all proof or evidence, I whispered my hope nonetheless that we might one day find each other again on the other side of this Mystery.
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