Eternal Rest - Aug 31 2026

 

Eternal Rest

Aug 31 2026

The ashes of the dead

live in a plain cardboard box

on a closet shelf

behind a pile of winter clothes.

Either forgotten there,

or left

out of sight and mind.

Because whether it’s denial

or indecision

the finality of death is hard to accept,

and this final act

would be a clear admission

she’s gone for good. 

  . . . “for good”,

as if imagining

some benign master plan

to soften the fact.

Or perhaps they were simply uncertain

where best to scatter them,

disagreed

about favourite haunts

and noteworthy rites of passage.

The remains

of scorched bone and blackened ash

represent, as Descartes proposed

the separation of body and mind.

So in the box, only atoms remain;

the body

reduced by fire

to its essential elements,

while the soul disappeared

at the moment of death.

The ineffable soul, whatever that is

  — the ghost in the machine?

the sentient life force?

the warm breath

of a benevolent God?

Or if it somehow lingered

 — either lost, or hanging on confused —

it’s still most certainly gone;

up in smoke

into cold winter air

when the burners rumbled to life.

So they can dispose of me wherever,

scattered to the wind

consigned to the sea

or returned to the soil;

free to honour my remains

for sentimental reasons,

or whatever sense of closure they need.

But not eternal rest.

Because I am resigned to death’s finality;

no spirit will live on,

we will not reunite

in the fullness of time

in some airy celestial sphere.

And favourite haunt or not,

nothing of me will be left

to dwell in eternal repose

if you scatter my ashes there.

Katherine Ashenburg wrote in this weekend's Globe about disposing of her parents’ ashes. She never uses the term “eternal rest”, but even this — Our mother would be happy to be spending time with some of her favourite plants, our father at the faux castle and the golf course — bothered me. Because there is more than enough death denial in our culture. We refuse to accept its finality, cleaving to myths about afterlives, heaven, and the dead looking down on us. Death isn’t restful. Rather — and hard as this is to imagine — it’s a state of annihilation, obliteration, utter non-existence. 

Are you death denying or accepting? The poem presents both belief systems. I’m clearly on the side of death as final. I suppose the best way to imagine such an inconceivable state of non-existence is to consider your state of sentience during the 4 billion years before you were born. Which is also how the many more billion that follow your death will be. While your actual life is not even a blink in the vast sweep of time. Or (if you’re the type who can get your head around the arcane world of physics) it might help to consider the photon:  extinguished the exact instant it’s created. (Arcane indeed!)

Here’s how her essay begins:

‘Dad weighs eight pounds,” my brother e-mailed us. “Mom weighs five.” I didn’t understand the discrepancy in the weight of their ashes – in life our parents were not that far apart in size – or why my brother thought this fact was worthy of noting. In any case, we were about to become intimately acquainted with at least some of those ashes.

My father died 21 years ago and my mother almost 19. A doctor and a nurse, they had bequeathed their bodies to the medical school where my father had trained, to be dissected by students. When their year as cadavers were finished, each was cremated and the University of Rochester sent us their remains in two rugged but tasteful containers made of high impact polypropylene, roughly the size of a child’s shoe box. More or less willingly, my middle sister stores in her Rhode Island house the family archive of dishes, silver and other sentimental objects no one wants. What was left of our parents rested in her attic for almost two decades.

But now, partly because my sister is downsizing and partly because the free-floating obligation to do something meaningful with our parents’ ashes felt more insistent, we had decided to act. A few friends expressed surprise that we hadn’t done anything until now, but others confessed that they had stashed their parents’ or spouse’s ashes in a closet for decades.

Seventy-seven per cent of Canadians and 62 per cent of Americans are cremated, but many North Americans are still unsure what to do with the family remains. About one in five Canadian households and one in four American ones include the ashes of at least one person. Funeral directors will tell you that 1 per cent of families never collect their relatives’ ashes. (They do things differently in Scandinavia, where, out of concern for the dignity of the dead, it is illegal to keep ashes at home.)

I looked up cremation in The Mourner’s Dance, a book I wrote about mourning customs 25 years ago, and reacquainted myself with a handful of uncertain, eccentric solutions to the problem of ashes. One involved a man who had cared for his father devotedly but could not cope with his cremated remains. He took them to a friend and begged him, “I don’t care what you do with them, but you must never tell me.” The friend agreed, and disposed of them in his office dumpster.