After a thoroughly grey day, I was excited to perceive a faintly blue tint as it drew to a close.
Checking my weather app to see if gloomy predictions had changed, I noted that our current condition claimed bright sunlight which I thought was a slight exaggeration!
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Dad used to get incensed over bad weather forecasts.
Maybe that was to do with viewing cricket matches.
The most frequent sentence in British sport:
“Rain stopped play.”
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“Want to go for a helavit ride?”
asked Grant.
Rides we take, just for the hell of it.
Well why not. If I stayed home I risked finding myself doing something useful.
Though these photographs are from the previous such excursion, back to Wilbur road, from the other direction.
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Soon we’ll create a flower bed by the graves up in the corner of the property. We’ll add the container of Patches ashes, probably Tom and Colin as well and maybe ashes from some of the foster-cats.
Until I came here, I never had the option of burying deceased pets, mostly because I lived in apartments.
In Washington it was because I knew I would not be that house permanently.
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It has always been my intention to have my own ashes combined with those of all my pets and buried or scattered together.
That spot at the end of the property is as good as any, I suppose.
Sometime in the future maybe that hill will get ploughed up. I don’t mind being part of a crop but I don’t want to end up in building foundations.
As if it makes a scrap of difference.
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Human remains, it seems to me, are a great inconvenience. When the spirit is gone, the body is an empty shell.
Memorial or religious services fill a need certainly, but really does the body need to be present?
It’s unlikely they will want it, but my body will be offered to medical science. If that should prove to be a final rejection, I opt for the fastest, cheapest means of disposal.
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Airlines frequently carry HUREMS.
We had to ensure that dogs were never loaded in the same hold because being near a cadaver made them freak out.
It wasn’t just dogs either. Some of the ramp workers freaked out too.
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One early morning, I went to meet the South African Airlines flight. My friend Tim who was their representative greeted me with an unlikely scenario:
“Warn the ramp staff there’s a body in the hold, in a catering bag.”
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I raised an eyebrow:
“Do tell!”
A first class passenger had succumbed to a heart attack during the layover in Sal Island.
The man was definitely deceased, doctors and ambulances were not going to help.
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But, what to do with the body?
The man had been travelling to New York and offloading the body in the Cape Verde Islands was going to be a great inconvenience and expense to his family, not to mention a mind bender.
When passengers die in-flight, the crew endeavour to conceal the fact so as not to upset everyone else.
If there is a spare row of seats that’s where the body goes, nicely covered up, of course.
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When the flight is full, oh dear.
In that case, I believe one of the toilets suddenly becomes “unserviceable”.
This long ago SAA flight was completely full. But the aircraft was still on the ground.
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Apart from considerations of the family, alerting the authorities at Sal Island would involve all manner of tedious and lengthy technicalities which would seriously delay the already long flight, to no-one’s benefit.
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The fast-thinking crew came up with the idea of using heavy-duty catering bags. The man was wrapped up and removed to hold 5 for the rest of his journey.
The authorities in New York were unsurprisingly not impressed with this in-orthodox situation that they had never before been confronted with.
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No doubt they racked their brains to find the sort of offence this might present, which would require reams of paperwork and exorbitant fines, but with a body in a bag and it being very early in the morning, scowling faces had to suffice.
Tim was good at dealing with that sort of thing.
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Meanwhile the ramp personnel were equally unhappy as they were the ones required to actually deal with offloading the item.
It is long ago and I don’t remember the details, but I imagine a mortician met the flight and took over. I do recall that the family were indeed grateful.
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Until I was 17, I had never seen a dead body. Then I was obliged to attend a wake and the whole thing struck me as creepy. I knew for sure that it wasn’t something I would want for myself.
The few funerals I have had to arrange were all closed-coffin with brief services.
Then there was my father, the atheist.
There was no-one to attend a service in any case.
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Dad died in a nursing home from esophageal cancer. He was very unhappy and soon his mind wandered.
A call came one day to say the end was near so I went and sat beside him, not knowing what to feel. I was fairly certain he wouldn’t hear me even if I could think of something to say.
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He had never wanted to be a father and had shirked most the his responsibility. He had caused me a lot of difficulties and yes even trauma.
Yet when he grew old he expected me to occupy myself with his care and I resented it, which made me feel a terrible person.
But he was my father. I had so wanted him to love me and there had been a couple of times when we were almost friends, but he made me so uncomfortable.
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As I sat trying to feel something, I heard a sound and thought it must be the death rattle.
Moments later a nurse came by and confirmed he was gone but he looked no different. I am certain his self/soul had already been gone when I got there.
It was only when I called the office to say I needed time off that I began to cry and I am not sure what the tears were about.
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There was no funeral. After a few days I got a call to go and collect Dad’s ashes and I found myself in a very unsettled state.
When I got home I found that I could not force myself to bring Dad’s ashes into the apartment, no matter how I berated myself.
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My brother Peter was going to come over a couple of months later so we could scatter the ashes together.
Every time I saw the box with Dad’s ashes in the garage I cringed but still I left him there.
Then one day I turned on the car radio and heard the New World Symphony.
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It had been one of Dad’s favourites and mine too. Instant brain flash.
While on holiday in Utah, we had gone to Kodachrome State Park, mostly because my dad was a photographer and the name appealed to him.
Dad was most impressed and I decided it was where we should scatter his remains.
I found a copy of the New World Symphony and I arranged a hire car that had a CD player.
When the time came, I inserted the disc and turned up the volume. Together we spread Dad’s ashes beneath Grosvenor Arch to the sound of Dvorak’s 9th symphony.
I learned then what it means to have closure, though Dad wasn’t quite done with me.
For a long time I used to periodically smell his cigar smoke. And there was one other nudge…
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A year or so later, I was asked to go and pick up a neighbour who had been convalescing in a nursing home. My Dad’s nursing home.
When I got there, my friend was not ready, so I was asked to go back to the wing where he was.
And found myself in the room where my Dad had died.
I wish, Carolyn, that I could thank you for today’s post, as I always do, but the topic is so odd that even you writing about the beauty of ice and winter seems more pleasant.
Joanna
It’s alright, Joanna. It’s a subject I always had difficulty with too until I was confronted with the deaths of people I loved. I think our society makes death into such a horror when in fact it is just part of a cycle. Of course I am not talking about the appalling death caused by wars and such tragedies.
Life sometimes has surprises in store.
We wonder if some coincidences are really coincidences…
Indeed. Mostly I don’t believe in coincidence.
I love the grand sign for “Country Auto Recycling Systems.” Quite apt I suppose in a post about human remains!
The first time I saw a dead body was my maternal grandfather, laid out in a coffin in the parlour of their house. I was 13, and he looked asleep to me. My uncle was crying, unusual for a grown man at that time in working-class London.
Of course, I became an EMT in my 20s, after which I saw so many bodies, I genuinely lost count. I became used to ‘living with the dead’, and wrote about it when I started blogging.
https://beetleypete.com/2012/11/23/ambulance-stories-18/
Best wishes, Pete.
This is quite a heavy topic to write about … and you do it so well. The story of the man who died aboard the SAA flight was very interesting.
Even though I worked in a hospital, I had never seen a dead person. Although … one night, while cleaning up after a function, I did “see” a patient in the hospital hallway (only to find out the next day that the same patient had actually died earlier in the day and that it couldn’t be possible … but I know what I saw)!
That is certainly creepy!
A difficult subject but how beautiful scattering the ashes at the Grosvenor Arch to the sound of Dvorak’s 9th Symphony.
Sadly, I’ve seen both my parents deceased and I don’t wish to see another dead body – once seen, it can’t be unseen. 🙁
Indeed. I was spared seeing my mother and my aunt. It’s not the last memory you want of someone you love.
I wasn’t close to my parents, but it’s still not an image I’d like in my memory.