Bone Meal

Photo by John MacDougall

Last summer I had the strange experience of scattering my father’s ashes. 

It was strange for a number of reasons.

One is that a few days before I scattered them, I’d seen an episode of the TV series The White Lotus, in which Tanya, the lonely alcoholic, who carries around her mother’s ashes in an ornate gilt box, likens the scattering of them to dumping fishmeal into an aquarium. 

I couldn’t get that image out of my head as we – my brother Don, his wife Myriam, my wife Lorna, our daughter Isabel, and our old friend Tim, who owned the boat we were in – traveled Oromocto Lake, visiting Dad’s favorite fishing spots, scattering his ashes.

It’s a big lake, thirteen kilometres long, four-and-a-half kilometres wide, second largest in New Brunswick, and mostly undeveloped.

Our family had a cottage on it for almost sixty years.

A couple of years ago, after Dad was hospitalized, Don and I sold it.

That leads to the second strange aspect of my ash-scattering experience. 

For the occasion, we rented the cottage back from the people we sold it to so that we’d have a place to stay.

But the cottage was changed. 

The new owners had renovated it inside and out. 

Not only were Mother and Dad not there to greet us when we arrived (they died about a year apart, first Mother, age 89, then Dad, age 90), the cottage itself – the one Don and I spent all our summers in when we were kids, and visited many times since – was radically altered. 

The kitchen was ripped out.

The old wood stove, with its white enamel oven door and nickel fittings – gone!

The wide knotty-pine walls – gone!

The old kitchen merged with a bedroom to form a gleaming new space with an island, stainless steel appliances, and eggshell-white walls.

The large picture window in the living room – the one that Dad salvaged from an old Esso service station – gone, replaced by a smaller window.

The living room stripped of all Mother’s collections – her glass insulators, her shells, sea glass, driftwood, old steam irons, and whatnot.

All the old comfy furniture – sofa, armchairs, footstool – gone, replaced by new stuff.

The place had a streamlined, de-cluttered look.

I didn’t hate it

It was done tastefully, in an Ikea sort of way.

I’m not complaining.

It just wasn’t Mother.

It wasn’t us.

One thing the new owners retained was Dad’s long pine dining table.

For me, that table was the center of the cottage.

Not only was it where we ate; it’s where we played countless games of crib and auction forty-five, where we laughed and joked and argued and drank sometimes long into the night.

Another thing I found strange were the ashes themselves.

They weren’t really ashes. 

At least Dad’s weren’t. 

His were like bone meal, like the stuff you sprinkle around the base of a rose bush to help it grow. 

It’s weird to look in a box of this stuff – the blue plastic-lined cardboard box that comes from the crematorium – and think, that’s Dad? 

That’s the guy who drove across the Reversing Falls Bridge with a giant-size sheet of fiberboard on the car roof, holding it with his left hand out his side window, steering with his right, me on the passenger side, reaching out my side window with my right hand, desperately hanging on to it, as the wind tried to rip it from my grip, as we drove across the bridge that crazy night, taking the fiberboard home to our apartment where we planned to prop it up against the wall at the end of the hallway and use at as a backboard for throwing darts?

That’s the guy who taught me how to tie a necktie, how to throw a Frisbee, how to catch a hardball, how to swim, how to ride a bike, how to play horseshoes, how to execute the kill shot in handball? 

That’s the guy who took me to see Bonnie and Clyde and In the Heat of the Night and Cool Hand Luke, who introduced me to the pleasure of movies? 

That’s the guy who supported me, encouraged me, and never judged me, even when I crashed in ’98 and had to get treatment?

Yep, that’s him.

That’s the guy in the box, that’s his remains, as they say at the funeral home.

Life reduced to this – a box full of grit suitable for growing plants.

That’s my father in there – all that’s left of his long, durable, active life, his love of Mother, his love of his kids, his love of the Lake, his love of fishing, his love of birds, his love of campfires, his love of Keith’s India Pale Ale, his love of Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburg Penguins, on and on – the spark of life reduced to … fucking bone meal.

Ah well, what did I expect, for god’s sake? 

No one lives forever. 

Death is part of life, and so on and so forth. 

Still, it’s a shock to see it for real, to hold it in your hand, and feel its texture. 

Bone meal. 

The factuality of it is startling. 

No sense getting sentimental. 

This is all that survives us. 

Back into the earth we go, or, in Dad’s case, into the Lake.

The Lake is calm, the day sunny and warm.

The sky is my favorite kind of sky – sheer blue, the color of Windex.

We gather on the beach in front of the cottage. 

Myriam carries the box of ashes. 

Tim brings his boat to shore; we climb in.

Myriam and Isabel are in the bow; Tim’s at the controls; Don’s in the seat next to him; Lorna and I are at the back.

Tim shoves the throttle forward and off we go, surging through the blue water.

What a day to be on the Lake!

Dad would’ve eaten it up!

First stop, Gull Island.

This is where Don and Myriam scattered Mother’s ashes.

We knew this is what she wanted, because she told us. 

I didn’t attend that ceremony because of the interprovincial travel limits due to the coronavirus. 

But if Dad ever said where he wanted his ashes scattered, I wasn’t aware of it. 

We assumed he’d want them put where Mother’s had been released. 

Pretty safe assumption; he loved her. 

And we decided that while we were at it, we’d scatter some at his favorite fishing holes, too.

Dad loved the Lake.

He knew every inch of it.

He had a boat, a white Boston whaler, with a sixty horsepower Mercury outboard motor. 

He used it to explore and fish that lake.

He poked around in every corner of it, knew its shallows, knew its depths, knew its rocks and inlets and currents, knew its weather, which could be very fickle.

Today, the weather is perfect.

I was going to say “heavenly,” but I’ll steer clear of any religious connotations.

This is a secular occasion.

I’m sure that’s the way Dad would want it.

After Gull Island, we go to Kelly’s Island, Dexter’s Island, Oars Point, Rangers Camp Cove, Rocky Cove, and Bare Ass Beach. 

These are local names known to us lake-dwellers.

You might not find all of them on a map.

At each place, we stop for a while and release scoopfuls of Dad’s ashes into the water.

And this is another strange aspect of the experience.

When the white, powdery “ash” enters the water, it billows, turns key lime colour, and seems to glow.

It dances in the water like a curtain in a breeze.

It reminds me of Northern Lights.

I have no idea what accounts for this effect.

Bone meal has phosphorous in it.

Maybe that’s what makes it glow in the water?

I have no idea.

But the effect is striking.

We lingered at Bare Ass Beach, our last stop before heading back to the cottage.

Lorna, Myriam and Isabel waded ashore and walked the beach.

The luminous blue surface of the water, big old pines, dating back perhaps two hundred years or more, ragged dusky green line of spruce, with patches of lighter green for the pine, the play of light on the water – dazzling! 

Standing in the boat, pouring the last of Dad’s ashes in the water, I inadvertently spilled some on my bare feet.

I’m not sure how that happened.

The boat might’ve lurched.

The scoop might’ve been over-full.

Whatever the reason, there were Dad’s ashes on my feet and on the floor of the boat.

It was strange to feel it on my bare skin.

It was like sand, only grittier.

I stuck my feet out over the side of the boat and brushed them off, apologizing to Tim for making a mess. 

He said don’t worry about it, that he’d vacuum the boat when we got back. 

The surreal image of Dad’s ashes being sucked into Tim’s vacuum cleaner flashed through my mind. 

When we imagine what happens to us after we die, the interior of a vacuum bag is probably not the first image that leaps to mind.

But you know what?

I don’t think Dad would’ve cared.

He didn’t believe in an afterlife, at least I don’t think he did.

What he did believe in was a clean, tidy boat.

He would’ve agreed with Tim: vacuum up those ashes!