Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [35]
He led us into a room with a huge wooden table outfitted with tissue boxes and bottles of water. It reminded me of the hatchet rooms set up at my office when employees were laid off. He seated himself at the head and delivered us a well-prepared message about how sorry he was and how death is part of life, even when it happens at such a young age. Then his speech took an abrupt turn: “So, are we looking at caskets or are we looking at urns?” I appreciated his ability to get down to business, but I couldn’t help feeling a little repulsed by the question. My wife had been dead fewer than two days, and here was a guy treating the question of how to deal with her remains with the kind of attitude usually reserved for determining what type of breakfast meat to have with one’s eggs. But this choice wasn’t as easy as saying, “Bacon, of course.” In our more than twelve years together, Liz and I had never talked about what should be done if one of us were to die, and we were too young even to begin thinking about drafting a will that would have answered the question for me. I looked around the table, searching the faces of everyone in the room. Their teary eyes were staring back, waiting for my response.
But I didn’t know how to make these choices. Liz handled the tough decisions in our life. And before that, my parents had made them for me. I didn’t know if I should even be the one to answer the question at all. Maybe it should be up to the people who birthed and raised her? I peered up at them once again, and still their faces told me that I had to decide.
I was transported back to our 2004 trip to Kathmandu. During a break in Biraj’s wedding festivities, he suggested we visit Pashupatinath, the holiest Hindu temple in Nepal. A tour guide led us around the grounds, finally stopping on a bridge overlooking the Bagmati River. He pointed to the smoke rising from the banks of the river, the smoke that we had been breathing in. “If you look closely, you will see funeral pyres and cremations taking place down below,” he told us. Our faces instantly went from inquisitive to disgusted, and we did our best to stop inhaling the smoke that was all around us. The sight and smell of a body on fire was too much to deal with, so our tour ended there.
Then I thought about when I was in Kathmandu in 2006, this time by myself. I was compelled to go back to Pashupatinath, and to sit on the banks of the Bagmati River, watching the entire cremation ceremony. I witnessed body after body, each wrapped in white linen, brought to the cremation ghats on stretchers made of bamboo, then put onto the ground while a series of rituals were performed. The bodies were then placed on the funeral pyre, covered with wood, and lit while a man with a big stick stoked the fire. I watched as the wood and body were transformed into ash, and finally pushed into the river, thus bringing to an end the physical body. That day I realized that it was not the burning body or the smoke that rose from it that had alarmed us on that first trip; it was that we feared our own mortality. And to me, someone who doesn’t believe in an afterlife, as I sat there on the banks of the Bagmati River that day in 2006, finally came some peace with the idea of death.
This insight was a huge contrast to the mostly Catholic funerals I had attended growing up. I found a funeral with an open casket to be a bit macabre, and always felt that burial didn’t bring about any sense of finality. But cremation—the process of actually destroying the physical being once the brain stopped working and the heart stopped beating—well, that seemed like the only way to really say good-bye.
“We’re looking at urns.” It wasn’t my answer that surprised me as much as it was the certainty with which I stated it. I looked around the room once more, waiting for someone to object. No one did. The funeral director stood up and led