Bury Me Not

Another Tuscarora Tale

     Nothing matters to the dead/ that's what's so hard for the rest of us/ to take in-/ their complete indifference/ to our enticements/ our attempts to get in touch /they aren't observing us/ from a discreet distance/ they aren't listening/ to a word we say- /you know that /but you don't believe it/ even deep in a cave/ you don't  believe in total darkness/ you keep waiting…

                         from “Beyond Recall” by Sharon Bryan

My mother died on November 26, 2013 at the age of ninety-eight.  She tripped over a throw rug in her room at the assisted living facility in Elko, broke her hip, was taken to Renown Hospital in Reno, where she died four days before Thanksgiving.  We were all there.  My sister, Itha, made arrangements with the local Neptune Society for her cremation. It took us three years to figure out what to do with her ashes.

My husband and our two adult children got through Thanksgiving at our place in California and then they returned to their lives.   My husband agreed with my desire to spend Christmas in Tuscarora.   I had written Mom’s obituary for the Elko Daily Free Press.   In spite of Mom’s proximity to one hundred, I was surprised how many folks remembered her and sent their condolences. These were the family friends in Elko I wanted to remember during the holidays.

I  had come to Tuscarora a week ahead of my husband and was at my desk writing

Christmas cards when Julie Parks, our much-loved postmistress, called on my landline.    Her voice retained both the lilt of her North Carolina upbringing and a bit of Christmas spirit. 

 “Nancy,” she said, “there’s a package here for you.  Special delivery. Insured.  I  wanted you to know, in case it’s something special for Christmas.”

“I’ll be right there,”  I said.  When she scanned the  package and handed it to me,  I glanced at the return address and knew the contents.  

“Oh, Julie,” I said.  “It’s Mom!”  I could tell she didn’t know what to say.   I assured her, “It couldn’t be better.  Mom’s ashes mailed to the Tuscarora Post Office.  She’d see the humor and the appropriateness.  You know she would.”  Julie gave a skeptical nod.  Truth be told, I couldn’t remember whether it was my sister’s idea or mine to have Mom's remains sent to me at the Tuscarora P.O. 

”Now what?” I asked myself as I carried the surprisingly heavy box back to the house.

When Dad died in 1987,  Mom had a plan for his ashes.  She flew over the Ruby Mountains in a twin engine plane piloted by Kim Steninger, a family friend.  When Kim dipped the wings, Mom released the ashes. She hoped they would land near the rim of Verdi Lake.  Joe and Alex, two young friends of Dad, had hiked in and hammered into the granite a small bronze plaque with his name and dates.  We were sure he would have loved that,  just as he would have been moved by his memorial service in the steepled church in the hamlet of Lamoille at the base of the Rubies.  Everything was right.  Of course, my mother was the one in charge.

I was miffed with Mom for being non-committal about her remains. However,  I understood.  Her beliefs had much to do with the cosmos and little to do with organized religion.  The descendent of a pioneer family, Mom loved Milford, the town in central Utah where she grew up.  However, she was  aggravated by the persistence of the LDS church to keep her in the fold.  Besides, enduring her nineties was hard enough.   Let someone else-- my sister and me--deal with the post mortem responsibilities.   

Figuring out her last wishes bothered me more than it bothered her.  In 2005, the year she turned ninety, I started questioning her.  “Where do you want to be buried?  Do you want a funeral?”  She conceded she wanted to be cremated.   Regarding the particulars, her answer was the same.  “It’s up to you and Itha.  It’s what you want.”  

At the time, we were living on the Mendocino Coast of California.  My husband and I in our farmhouse in the redwoods.   Mom was in an assisted living facility five miles from us and half a mile from the Pacific Ocean.

There was one particular day when she said she might like having her ashes scattered in the sea.  We were driving over the winding coast range, returning from a doctor’s appointment thirty miles away in Ukiah.    She often wished aloud she were dead.   This time I think she heard the impatience in my voice when I pressed her, “You said you want to be cremated.  What about your ashes?”  

She thought for a minute and said,  “It might be strange for someone from Milford,  but I have always felt an affinity for the ocean.”  

“Great!” I said with a little too much enthusiasm. “So, what kind of ceremony do you want?”

She returned to her mantra, “It’s up to you and Itha.  It’s whatever you girls want.”

In a petulant outburst I said, “Don’t you see how different we are?  How do you expect we would agree on some ritual for scattering your ashes?”  I glanced at her.  She was facing straight ahead in her oversized “Dynasty” sunglasses.   

By this time, we were on a straight stretch through the redwoods along the Navarro River.  I broke the silence by saying, “Actually, I have a great idea for a one-act play.   It would be a comedy.  It would have a happy ending.”

“With me dead?” she said.  We both laughed.  

For the rest of the drive we sketched my idea for a play.  It involved the leading lady, Mom, giving special instructions for scattering her ashes to my sister and me—as though each was the  favorite who knew her best. Her instructions were customized to our  personalities.  

“So, for example, your instructions to me,” I said, “would be a picnic at Ten Mile beach with bourbon and beef.  We would sit on hay bales in the sand.  A local hippie in a cowboy hat would play the guitar.  We’d sing,  ‘Home Means Nevada’ and ‘Shine on Harvest Moon’.  Everyone would get tipsy, tell stories about you and Dad, laugh, cry,  and end with a bonfire on the beach.”

“I like that,” she said.

“But, Mom, your instructions to Itha would be so different.  Her instructions would be for everyone to come dressed in white organic cotton.   We would walk across the dunes talking quietly among ourselves about your affinity for the ocean and how you liked reading about space travel and that your class motto at Milford High was ad astra per aspera, “to the stars through difficulty.”  There would  be a fiddler playing Welsh folk tunes in honor of your ancestry”

“I would want champagne,” she interjected.

   “Roederer champagne in crystal glasses,” I said.  

“ I like that one, too.” she said.

“Do you see how different they are?”  By this time we were at the intersection of Highway 253 and Highway 1.  The ocean was in sight.   She looked toward the setting sun and then turned to me.  “You will have to work it out.”  

 I never told my sister about the play.  She would have been annoyed with me and thought I was brash and insensitive.  She would have been about half right.   

In 2010, the year she turned ninety-five, we moved Mom back to Elko to the Highland Manor, the new assisted living facility.   Although the last three years of her life were barely tolerable, it helped that I was retired, spending considerable time at our place in Tuscarora, bringing her out for day trips, and going into Elko to take her to lunch.  Also, she was in the vicinity of  the memories of her married life–their younger years as part of the nearby ranching communities and then more than three decades participating in the community life of Elko.  Still.  It was hard.  

That morning after my mother died, my sister and I had a tearful conversation.  She wanted a gathering on June 23, 2014, Mom’s birthday.  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” she said, “if Mom’s four grandchildren would hike into the Rubies and scatter Mom’s ashes?  Do you think Joe or Alex would act as a guide to Verdi Lake and the bronze plaque?”  Even as I nodded in agreement,  I knew it was wishful thinking.

It was 2017 before my sister and I reached a decision.  While Mom’s cremation urn gathered dust in the storage shed in Tuscarora, my sister held out for a family gathering and the hike to Verdi Lake.  I  was researching wildcat scattering.  Since Dad’s aerial scattering forty years earlier, the unauthorized scattering of cremated remains had become a very popular way to honor a loved one’s memory.   But some of the choices were just plain weird, like flushing your buddy’s ashes down a toilet in the men’s room at Wrigley Field because he was a Cubs fan or mixing a small amount of a loved one’s ashes into tattoo ink.  

The one commercial ash-scattering enterprise I thought my mother would have liked is Elysium Space, which offers “awe-inspiring memorial spaceflights to have a symbolic portion of a departed’s ashes launched into space.”  However, it is ridiculously expensive.   

Ash scattering seemed both contrived and subjective in an increasingly secular world.  In my mind it seemed right that the private ritual of Dad’s wildcat scattering over the Rubies  was followed by the public memorial of friends and family in the community church in Lamoille.  I kept thinking about  the traditional ways to honor our dead.   

Dad’s  final resting place could have been in the cemetery in Brigham City, Utah.  Both the Harris family and the Clarks, Granny’s people, have headstones there.  I know because that was a tradition in our family, to go into “Brig” for Decoration Day.  That’s what Memorial Day was called.   It meant the five Harris brothers and sisters and their kids gathered for the long weekend. We all went to the cemetery–grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins– and placed flowers at each grave.  

It  turned out that a certain website was helpful in my research.  .  I could confirm my youthful memories by viewing Granny and Grandpa Harris’s headstone:

    Henry William Shorland Harris         Adela Maude Clark Harris   b. July 14, 1885  d. April 27, 1968 b. Oct. 21, 1898 - d. Jan. 29, 1957

In 2017, I went to findagrave.com again and researched  the cemetery in Milford, Utah, where Mom and her siblings were born.  It was like opening the door to a family reunion.  There was so much information!  Both dates and faces.  Through the  online link to the names of the deceased, I discovered that quite a few kinfolk are buried there:  Mom’s grandfather  Ebenezer Tanner and two of her uncles, Howard and Clyde.  I told my sister  I’m pretty sure that Sarah Ann Richards, daughter of William Morgan Richards, is Mom’s  great grandmother,  a well-known midwife in the area and whose family converted  to Mormonism and  immigrated from Wales. 

I admitted to my sister that it bothered  me to think that this earthly remnant of our mother will be scattered to the winds or floated down a mountain stream and there will be no record of her name.  I said I’d like for us to have a modest granite  headstone made, and, sometime in the coming year, the two of us make a road trip to the Milford cemetery to put it in place. 

I confessed I wasn’t  sure Mom would think it was a great idea.   She had  fond stories of growing up in Milford, but  she went to quite a bit of trouble to get herself removed from the rolls of the Mormon Church. She certainly didn’t believe in their version of an afterlife. However,  it turns out it is important to me--and my sister, too.

So that's what we did.  Ad astra per aspera.