My Box Wrapped in Velvet

“We All Fall Down” by Nancy Miller Gomez

My father died while I was in the sky between Seattle and Denver. I was returning from AWP, changing planes, and I knew the moment I saw I had a message waiting what it would say.

Four days prior I’d gotten a call from my sister. The doctor said my dad had 3-4 days left at most, and she wanted me to know, felt like I should say goodbye to him even though we hadn’t talked in years. She was right.

Still, I didn’t call until I was changing planes in Denver on my trip out. Part of it was that life had just been that hectic. Our twins were three weeks old and I was trying to get my mother-in-law up to speed on taking care of them and Amy. She was patient with me, which I have always appreciated. Maybe part of it was that I wanted to have this conversation in a place where it felt impossible for anyone who knew me to overhear or see my reaction if it didn’t go well. It’s always easy to disappear in a crowd of people who are all trying to get somewhere else and are either hurrying or waiting to do it.

The twins are two weeks old in this picture, but close enough.

The call went as well as any phone call can go when one person is in late-stage dementia and the other doesn’t know what to say. We talked for about ten minutes and had the same conversation three times. I tell myself he knew who I was.

By the time my dad died we hadn’t had a real relationship in about 18 years. I was officially kicked out of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in January 1998, though I’d stopped identifying as one in mid-1995, and that meant since I wasn’t part of the congregation, I couldn’t be part of the family anymore either. When we communicated, there had to be some specific reason—a question about insurance, news about extended family. And of course the semi-regular attempt to get me to become a Witness again, which would allow for normalizing the family part again. But no shooting the shit, no talking about football or retelling stories from childhood or catching up over a dish my mom called Mexican lasagna, flour tortillas with layers of meat and cheese and veggies between them stacked in a Crock Pot and set on low for 10 hours.

During those 18 years, my dad lost more and more of his ability to process and access his memories. He never lost his ability to do things, from what I understand. He could balance a checkbook; he just couldn’t remember that he’d done it already. One time he recognized a neighborhood near one of the many elementary schools he attended as a child even though he hadn’t been there in decades, and walked my mom and some friends through winding streets to show them the old school, still standing and in use. He could talk you though the strings of scripture to prove some doctrinal point just as he had when he was an elder in the congregation. And then he’d do it again.

He didn’t forget that I wasn’t a Witness.

When he died there was no way I could get to the funeral in person. It was in San Antonio, I’d just gotten home from a trip, my mother-in-law couldn’t stay. It was impossible. But the local congregation had set up a system years before for my dad where he could phone in and listen to the meetings when he was too frail to be there in person, and so that’s how I went. I sat in my house with my phone on speaker and listened to an elder I didn’t know talk about a hope for resurrection I didn’t believe in.

No one from the family talked. That’s not how Witness funerals work, not in my experience. I’d like to say that I remember every word but I can’t. I remember feeling the distance; the miles between Des Moines, Iowa and Boerne, Texas might as well have been measured in parsecs, in the silence of space.

Not long after the funeral, I got another call from my sister, this time asking if I wanted some of my dad’s ashes. Most would go to the mausoleum in San Antonio, but if we wished, we could get each some put in a tiny urn to have with us.

The urn with some of my father’s ashes in it, set in a blue velvet case.

I said yes. I said it because I don’t know how I could have said no in that moment. It’s not like I hated my father. The divide between us wasn’t because he’d beaten me for years or abused me. And even though the net effect of he and my mom saying that their adherence to doctrine was more important to them than our relationship was that I felt unworthy of affection, I don’t think that was their intent. (Yes, I have talked to my therapist about all this for years.) The whole time we weren’t talking, I wanted us to be talking, just not about the one thing he was willing to talk about.

But I wanted some part of him. No, it’s more true to say that I didn’t want to regret not having part of him close to me, because this was a one-time deal. There was no “we can pull the urn out for a quarter-teaspoon for you later on.” And I honestly didn’t know when or if I would ever get to San Antonio to visit the mausoleum in person. I wanted a part of him to say goodbye to.

Except now I’ve got this urn. It’s silver, tiny, fits in the palm of my hand. It’s heavier than I expect, though I have no idea what to expect. It comes in a box, (its own coffin?) wrapped in navy blue velvet, a simple silver latch on the front of it. And now I’ve got to do something with it because as long as I have it, I can’t fully say goodbye.

They don’t warn you about this when they ask you if you want the urn, that you’re going to have to make decisions about it. Where are you going to put it? How often do you want to be reminded of your father’s death? What’s an appropriate level of respect?

So many of the story possibilities around this situation spring from the idea that my dad, in the afterlife, is watching me trying to make these decisions and having various emotional reactions. I bet some clever writers could throw together a whole web video series around this concept. Maybe even a podcast. The ghost dad who haunts his kids because of where they’ve put his secondary urns and so on.

But my dad didn’t believe in an afterlife. The Witnesses believe death is the end of consciousness until God resurrects the faithful after Armageddon, so there’s no haunting, but also no smiling down from heaven beatifically. He’s not there to judge me for my choices. I get to do it for him.

Currently my share of my dad’s ashes sits on a shelf in my office beside other urns, the remains of the cats Amy and I have loved and said goodbye to in the nearly quarter-century we’ve been together. I hung the shelf recently for just that purpose. Before that they were all on top of a bookshelf behind my desk, out of sight. They all deserved better.

The urn shelf in my office. The vases are from our wedding in 2011. The landscape is a pastel Amy did. It’s one of my favorite things in the world.

I came across the poem I’m writing about today last month, as part of my job as the host of The Rumpus Poetry Book Club, a job that’s about to end soon. That’ll be its own post. It’s by Nancy Miller Gomez from her book Inconsolable Objects, recently published by YesYes Books. It’s titled “We All Fall Down,” which immediately invokes the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” (which I just learned is NOT about the plague—huh) and begins this way:

 

Ashes coated my son’s cheeks,

his lashes, his hands still gripping

the pressure-sealed bag

that exploded when he opened it.

 

And let me tell you the words “oh no” came out of my mouth the first time I read that passage. I really like the way the title and “ashes” as the first word hints at the age of the child here, someone small and curious who just needs to know and has no concept of what they’re doing or what could possibly happen. Gomez keeps us in that moment with the next lines:

 

I just wanted to see, he said.

I wiped soot off his eyebrows,

rubbed a smudge off his lip.

It came out everywhere, he said,

and we both began to laugh,

gasps that grew into a keening

and filled the room.

 

I think in the abstract, the idea of being there when someone opens up the bag of ash inside an urn and it explodes all over them is one of those scarring-for-life moments. Just as a witness to it, as the person who has to help clean it up or soothe the person covered in cremains. I can’t even fathom what it would be like to be the kid here, but what saves the moment from spinning into horror is that the kid is so innocent, unaware on some level of what’s just happened, that it allows room for the humor of the moment to take over. There’s this cathartic release of energy that starts as laughter and moves to keening, lamentation. But never to sadness.

 

Then we were silent.

I helped my son sweep his dad

off the chairs, the stairs, emptied

the inside of his shoes and collar,

but the gritty gray bits

of bone and ash wouldn’t fit

back inside the plastic urn.

 

I really like the tone here, the matter-of-factness of it. The reader needs to breathe after the explosion/realization, but also there’s a sense that after this terrible moment, we still have to get on with life, and that means cleaning up the ash and trying to put it back.

In our home, I’m the designated handler of gross things—poop, vomit, carcasses of mice that have somehow wandered into a house filled with animals that delight in torturing and killing them—and so I saw myself in this moment caught between needing to comfort my child and clean them up but also somehow show respect to the remains of my loved one, though what I’m really trying to respect is the symbol of them, the concrete reminder of who they were to me. They’re not materially harmed in any way because they’re not in the ash, not in my belief system anyway, but I still feel like I owe it to their memory because I agreed to be responsible for this part of who they were.

The poem doesn’t go that route, however, and I found it freeing.

 

Could it be, even after death,

love expands? We scooped up

what was left and dropped it

from the balcony

like snow.

 

The speaker has to confront the question, what do you do in this situation no one could have prepared you for? What do you do with the ash that doesn’t fit back in the container? With this part of a person who was once an integral part of your life and who lives on in your memory? I can imagine a scenario where the speaker looks for solutions, for a machine or company that will reseal the remains back into a bag small enough to fit back inside the urn, or where they put together a temporary fix until they can get a final resting place for the urn or a symbolic spot for the ashes to be scattered.

But in the end, she puts back what will fit and then with her kid, they scatter what was left from the balcony, a sort of goodbye ceremony. They keep what they can and say goodbye to the rest which feels like an apt metaphor for relationships.

Thanks as always for reading this far. I’d love to read your stories like this, either in the comments or if you have your own Substack/website, over there. Drop links in the comments if you like. Take care.