Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
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Where, oh where can they be, I asked myself, desperation raising tears. “They” were my father’s ashes. I upturned a small jewellery case, knowing it was too small to hold them. Next the file drawers jammed as they were with the detritus of decades I still could not bear to part with. No ashes. Where had my grief-stricken mind thought to stow them two months ago? To keep them safe, I’d hidden them. As if anyone would want a baggie of ashes, I ranted now.
I had scooped a cupful of ashes from the humidor – which the funeral home had recommended – holding my father’s surprisingly heavy remains. And he was such a small man. I ignored the queasiness I read on my brother’s face and pushed down my own, as I tipped a measure of dad’s ashes into a baggie, so I could scatter them in significant places of his early life – the Ringstrasse in Vienna where he’d spent his first 17 years and into the Atlantic on Ireland’s west coast where he’d lived for the next 16, I explained to my brother.
“Fine,” he’d said, “But you know he is going to St. Jude’s cemetery alongside mum.”
“I know,” I replied. The scoop spoke to my resolve to mark all the chapters of my father’s life, even those he’d wanted to forget. I felt his death had opened up space for me to have a say.
“The rituals surrounding death are for the living,” I said to my brother. “And this is mine.”
When it was time to stop driving, handing over my licence wasn’t as hard as I’d feared
I’d checked the airline regulations. I knew “properly contained and respectfully handled” ashes could fly across the Atlantic. “Okay, dad, we’ll go,” I whispered as I placed the baggie into a Japanese memento box.
Days before I was to leave for Ireland and still no luck in finding the ashes, I had to face that there would be no ceremony in Dingle Bay, my mother’s birthplace where they had spent many happy times. No air of Danny Boy would soar over the Atlantic waves as my father’s remains were swept out to sea. Maybe just as well, for I was still too raw with grief to hear this ode of farewell and love and longing my Vienna-born father, lifelong disdainer of music not “classical and preferably Viennese,” had chosen.
He knew he would be placed next to my Irish-born mother. Perhaps, I mused, he saw Danny Boy as his signal to her that 20 years though it had taken, he was on his way to meet her. “I want no other music,” he told me.
In the end, I left without the ashes only to find them weeks after my return and days before the family gathered for his formal burial. It was an April day when the ground was declared sufficiently defrosted for a hole to be dug. John McCormack’s Danny Boy floated over my mother’s snow-dusted marble marker and the new plot was ready beside hers. An icy rain seeped into the bones of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as if the heavens wept with us. We seemed to feel his loss more deeply than in the January days immediately after his death when shock and ritual carried us through.
Love sometimes means taking away Mom’s car keys
Almost a year later, I returned to Ireland with my baggie of dad’s ashes. Dingle in County Kerry, scene of many of his fondest memories, was the first stop. The scattering did not go quite as I had envisioned. I stood on the pier with two cousins as I dispersed his remains in as graceful an arc as I could manage against the wind whipping in from the Atlantic. The wind tossed the ashes back and coated us before changing course and whirling out to sea. We’d laughed as a cousin said, “Isn’t that just like himself!” And I could almost hear my father’s words, “Ah, you can never be sure of the sea. And didn’t it give me the last word!”
Vienna proved impossible for me to tackle alone. No relatives there for a proper goodbye. The Nazis had seen to that. He alone had escaped in 1939. I had always visited Vienna with him and realized I could not face the echoes of past horrors without him. I chose Mount Etna in Sicily instead. This was my need I was fulfilling, though I was confident that his burial at the foot of the volcano would have pleased him with its whimsy.
My husband, two friends and I scooped out a hollow under a distinctive pair of rocks I was sure I could find in years to come – if Etna’s future eruptions allowed.
As I whispered “auf Wiedersehn” with its promise of seeing each other again, I felt comforted. And did I really hear strains of Danny Boy dancing in the Sicilian breeze?
Jo Sorochinsky lives in Ottawa.