Foolsgold by Susan G. Wooldridge

Author:Susan G. Wooldridge [Wooldridge, Susan G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49554-9
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2007-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

24

poppa's ashes

Silent friend of many distances, feel how your breath enlarges all of space.

Let your presence ring out like a bell into the night.…

Move through transformation, out and in.

—RAINER MARIA RILKE

Small Midwestern towns drift like orderly constellations of golden lights in scattering grids on the prairie, small galaxies, the Pleiades twinkling, as my plane curves toward Chicago and winter snow. The pilot, in his warm wool coat, no doubt, warns of freezing fog and drizzle in Chicago. From the larger place, here, above, the storm we're entering looks luminous, cocoon-like. I dive with the plane into white unknown. Amber lights appear everywhere in the sky, on the ground, with houses and trees. We land, surrounded by snow like white ash.

In the morning my brothers and I sit around the kitchen table in Chicago with Mom, retelling the day Poppa died nearly a year ago. Mom says her parents knew exactly what to do when someone died. First, call Mr. Furth, friendly funeral director, and he'd tell you which coffin to use. Following custom at such times can be comforting. The Talmud is filled with rules and proscriptions for what to do in every situation, how to be in the world. Or else. Cremation is taboo.

In wide-open territory outside custom and tradition in honor of atheist Poppa, I discover I'm more custom-bound than I like to think. And at first I'm uncomfortable that we have no ritual form to follow.

“Heeere's Julian,” John announces like a TV emcee, as Rich appears holding a white-and-blue shopping bag emblazoned with a fluttering dove. We're all goofy in the presence of Poppa's ashes, which I secretly believe I've already dispersed invisibly in Wisconsin's Lake Sissabagama with Poppa in my imagination.

Rich opens the cardboard box as if it contains a mini-pizza. He reaches in and grasps the see-through bag, caressing ashes, poking them through plastic with his fingers like a kid with a wad of clay. Oldest son, somehow entitled, touching the untouchable, Richard puts us at ease. “What there is,” he says, “is ashes with some pieces of bone.”

“There's a blue pail under the sink,” John suggests, as we discuss logistics. No! I fiercely veto the pail and search for a round, melon-size covered pot I made years ago on the potter's wheel, when centering perfectly became a mission. The fragile sphere with a curved lid, glazed matte brown with “Sue's Soup,” became a gift to my parents. I had no idea it would become an urn to hold my father's ashes. I'm insistent. This is where the ashes belong.

Holding the globe in my hands here in the kitchen, I feel less wobbly, as if the pot I centered is now centering me like the piece of clay I shaped with my hands years ago.

“We'll take big spoons along,” Mom suggests. “I'm going to use my fingers,” Rich says. He recently helped scatter his father-in-law Bud's ashes and speaks with worldly experience. “Oh Pa, what are we doing to you!” Mom laments, remembering that Poppa said, “Just don't embarrass me” when she asked what he wanted after he died.

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