Putting Mom and Dad To Rest in the Garden

            For almost a decade I’ve had my parents’ ashes in two tins in my closet, one marked “Mom,” one marked “Dad,” not knowing what to do with them. I was respectful of the fact that they were the remains of the physical bodies of my parents, but I have other things – my father’s wooden bowls, my mother’s paintings, some furniture and pictures and crafts from my childhood home – that are more warmly reminiscent of who my parents were. It seemed morbid to display the ashes in urns on the mantel and inappropriate to scatter them in Oregon or at my own home, a place that hadn’t meant much to either of them. So the ashes stayed ignominious in the closet.

            The same was true of my siblings’ share of the ashes, until last month, when my sister Laura provided the perfect occasion for closure. In a small corner of her neighborhood park in Atlanta, she created a memorial garden, planting azaleas, ferns, and spring wildflowers by a small creek and setting a flagstone path to wind around a dominant pine tree. She planned a small ceremony in mid-May to bury our parents’ ashes and the ashes of her husband’s mother and his first wife in that garden.

            On the morning of May 14, Laura took me; my sister Sharon; my brother, Lee; her son, Dave; and her husband, Jack, to the newly created memorial garden to do some preparation for the ceremony. Lee and Dave built stone steps from the street into the garden. I pulled up ivy. Sharon cut dead branches; Laura dug holes for the four bushes that would be planted over the ashes; and Jack hauled away sticks and limbs and armloads of ivy. After our work, as we were contemplating the garden, a barred owl landed in a near-by tree. Soon another owl joined him. Lee said we should call the garden Owl-Cove. (Dad, punster that he was, would love it!). Since the park committee had a rule against the display of personal names in the park, we decided that the finishing touch would be a bench with, simply, “Memorial Garden” inscribed on it. With those plans in place and the garden cleaned, we were ready for the ceremony

            Laura didn’t want it to be a ceremony, exactly, and she didn’t want it to feel morbid, so she asked five people to speak on behalf of the memorialized family members, instructing us severely to keep our remarks short. At 5:00 that afternoon, a fine spring-warm day, nineteen people, from both the Coogle family (Laura’s) and the Burch family (her husband’s), including four children, gathered at Laura and Jack’s house, then walked the half-mile to the garden. Laura said a few words about why we were there.

Laura and Jack, opening remarks

Then Sharon and I said a few words about Mom; Lee about Dad; Jack about his mother; and Jack’s son about his mother. Then the Coogles planted two hydrangea bushes, each of us pouring into first one and then the other our share of our parents’ ashes (amazed at what a large quantity of ash a cremated body can make) while the Burch family was doing the same with their family ashes in holes for a rhododendron and a Virginia sweet spire.

Larua and Sharon prepare the hole for Mom's hydrangea.

Lee pours Dad's ashes into the prepared hole, Sharon looking on.

            Then the champagne popped, and we drank champagne and talked with each other, and the children ran through the park, and then we all walked back to Laura and Jack’s house where Laura had prepared salmon and salads and hors d’oeuvres, impeccably made and beautifully served, which all the guests enjoyed in her lovely back-yard garden. 

In Laura's back-yard garden

That night, after everyone else had left, Laura and Jack cleaned up while Sharon, Lee, and I sat long into the night, talking together in the Georgia evening, watching the moon rise over the rooftop, aware of the recent presence of the adult children playing games with their young children and sensing ourselves as the elders, now, letting the consciousness of the time when our ashes will enrich the soil and our children will sit where we were then, diminish into the twilight.