Next month I travel to Massachusetts to bury my father. He died in November. On the sixteenth. I found out about it on the seventeenth. On Facebook. Stephen Lee Beggs. It’s June. We’ll be putting his carbon in the ground in July. There’s too much distance between between his death and his funeral.
Funerals ought to happen as soon as possible after a person dies. It used to be that you got a guy in the ground quick because dead meat starts to rot and rotting meat stinks. This led itself well to the emotional well-being of the people left behind by the bastard who went and died. A few days later: you watched as his body was lowered into the ground, or was consumed by fire, or vultures, or the sea, or whatever. And you cursed his name or praised his memory with all the intensity the root of your freshly exposed emotion would allow.
In this case — seven months later — we have a bag full of ashes and bone fragments inside a cardboard box prepared by some white-collared furnace technician with all of the right papers prepared by the county clerk. Neat and tidy. And I’ll show up for a day, and we can have a neat and tidy Christian burial for a man who never really lived in a way that indicated he believed in anything. If it were up to me I’d put his ashes in a whisky bottle and keep him on the shelf. Nearby. Nearer than he ever was in life, but nonetheless separated from me by that bottle; his home. And by death, of course.
Cool conversation piece.
Them: What’s this?
Me: My Dad.
Them: What?
Me: My Dad’s ashes.
Them: Why are they in a whisky bottle?
Me: He was an alcoholic.
The way the rest of that conversation goes could really tell you something about the person you’re carrying on with.
If you find yourself living inside of a whisky bottle in life, you’ll end up in one after life. Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about hell-except-with-burning-liquor instead of fire. I’m talking about the hell you lived in echoing through the ages after your death. That’s about as close as I can get to heaven & hell: life + quantum physics.
Anyway, my dad’s dead and continues to be as isolated from creation and God (whatever nonobjective form of God you might know or choose not to acknowledge) as he was from me in life. I hope that I can find some connection to him on the twenty-first of July.
