An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [19]
The director brought us into our chapel.
I am sorry, he said, for the size of the room, but it is all we have.
The size of the room was vast, appropriate for the service of someone very famous, or very friendly, or very old, someone who could attract mourner after mourner. Surely they should have put the other funeral here, I thought, but maybe they weighed the possibilities and decided: to put fifty people in a room meant for two hundred is sadder than putting two people there.
This way, said the funeral director, and he brought us to the front, where the casket had been set on a cabinet. We had seen the casket only in a catalog at the funeral home by the hospital. The director said, I will leave you for a moment.
“It’s too big,” I said when he’d gone.
“I know,” said Edward, looking at the room yawning out behind us. It upset him. “If I were my father, I’d complain — ”
But I’d meant the casket. A brass plate had been fixed to the top: Pudding Harvey, 2006. I wondered how caskets came. I mean how they were sized. We’d chosen the cheapest casket, the cheapest urn. Now we touched the wood very tentatively. What age was this meant for? For a child, surely, not a baby, and it made me sad that he, who had so little to his name, was lying inside such a big, empty, dark space. I didn’t like to think of where he was in there, at the top, at the bottom, but I wondered. It should have fit him.
It would be burned too, of course, with the brass plate.
Again we had to nod at a French stranger and say, Yes, that’s fine, you may carry him away now. The cremation itself would take some time. We sat outside at a distance from the building and smoked cigarettes. After a while we realized we were sitting in the patch of land reserved for the scattering of remains, and we moved. At another time in our lives we might have been horrified. Now we just slapped the dust off the seat of our pants and moved on.
Who would scatter ashes here? The lazy? The unambitious? You stumble from the crematorium, and say, Well, here’s as good a place as any? We were having Pudding cremated because we wanted to take him out of France, and it was easier to do so in an urn than in a coffin, and we didn’t know where we’d bury him. My father had suggested the graveyard outside the church at the bottom of Edward’s parents’ driveway, where we’d been married, but when I thought about it I didn’t want to feel sad every time we drove past. We’d scatter them somewhere beautiful, once we’d come up with the right place. Surely that was the point of cremation: you could take your beloved anywhere, let him rest anywhere, not just walk out the door and chuck. I didn’t understand.
Maybe you just couldn’t afford a burial: the embalming, the plot, the stone.
Maybe you just wanted to be done with the whole sad business, you’d attended to your dying relative for months or years, or you’d had a long life with him, too long, in fact. You wanted to fling your sorrow over your shoulder and never look back.
We didn’t want to get it over with; it would take months for us to scatter his ashes. For now we found some clean grass and sat and smoked and flicked those lighter ashes into the air. After half an hour, we walked back in. The funeral director demonstrated our new possessions: the ashes, which were inside an urn with another plaque underneath that said Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006, which slipped into an innocuous blue nylon bag, and a certificate explaining to suspicious customs agents what the substance was. We thanked him.
“I want to pry that plaque off with a knife,” said Edward as we left. “I don’t want the word Bordeaux anywhere near him.”
We got in a car and headed for the rocade, the highway that girdled the city, for the last time in our lives.
When I was a teenager in Boston,