Human Remains - March 11 2026

 

Human Remains

March 11 2026

I was offered an urn with her ashes.

Human remains

reduced to elemental carbon

a few shards of bone. 

And an ornamental vase

on my mantelpiece

as if I needed a mnemonic,

as if given time

my memory would fade.

Do I regret declining it?

Was it hubris 

to think I didn’t need a place

to centre my remembrance,

an object

to keep her from turning more dream-like

than real?

Or are we too sentimental

about human remains?

The body

that’s not us

but mere flesh and blood,

that’s not our essence

but just the vessel that contains it.

Not the soul, if you’re religious

or the spirit if you’re not.

And not the ghost in the machine

a materialist like me

must simply accept

sight unseen.

So no fancy urn.

No marble slab

with a brief epitaph

that could never capture who she was.

But I did accept the ashes 

in a plain paper bag,

surprised

how light it felt.

Ashes

which I scattered in a place

I knew would make her happy.

Where they may even do some good;

her final act

to feed the earth

and then return to it.

I know I can’t keep her in my head forever. 

Know that I will also pass,

after which

she will be gone for good;

so in the fullness of time

it will be as if neither of us

had ever existed.

But then, nothing lasts  . . .

posterity runs out  . . .

and ever-after is a fantasy

we console ourselves with. 

Just as the urn 

for as long as it might last

will be meaningless to whoever is left.

Will be emptied, sold, or junked.

Or simply moulder

in a dark attic

gathering dust,

a cardboard box

in a damp basement

turning to rust.

So no urn, 

perhaps, not even any ashes.

But still, the lake she loved

and lived her best years beside.

Where I can look out

and every day imagine her

as she was in life.

I actually started to write this with my old dog Skookum in mind. An admission I know will be scoffed at by those who disparage the quality of love that can exist between humans and animals. All I can say is perhaps they’ll be fortunate enough to one day experience it for themselves. Nevertheless, it took just one line to concede that this might not play well with some (most?) readers, so it almost immediately became human remains.

I don’t believe in God or an afterlife. Perhaps this is why I’m so baffled by the reverence we show to bodily remains:  the need to recover dead bodies (even at the risk of other lives!), the elaborate burials, people’s concerns with what happens to “them” after death. Because “you” are gone, and the body that remains is simply a shell:  mere flesh and blood; an animal carcass;  meat.   . . . As I warned, irreverent!

I actually declined the ashes. In retrospect, I sometimes find myself wondering if this was the wrong decision. That it was a callous act of moving on. But at the time, it seemed merely sentimental to bother with them, an empty gesture that trivialized my feelings and didn’t honour her life:  that the ashes (whether kept or scattered) were no substitute for keeping her in my head, her memory alive. Because without me consciously travelling into the past, she might as well never have existed. The ashes couldn’t take the place of my responsibility to her memory, because — since the two of us lived a largely hermetic life — no one else would remember: I’m the sole custodian of her life. I also realize that, like all of us, both of us will eventually be utterly forgotten; but in the meantime (and perhaps more solipsistically) forgetting her would vaporize a big part of my own life, even as I’m still living it. 

If I had scattered them, it would have been in our lake. But even without that, I still imagine her there, in her element (she was a Lab, after all!). Which is where I end the poem.