About the ashes

This will probably be the last thing I post on here about my mother. Hopefully, this space will resume with writing updates, and a continuation of my good news blog written last year. But I wanted to write a little bit more about grief.

My mum has been in the house with me since I received her ashes from the crematorium a couple weeks after her second funeral, lying in wait for her scattering. The drive home was unsettling for me. The heavy box, kindly decorated with a white dove and placed inside a massive carded bag, was between my legs as my husband drove us home. I kept thinking she’s literally in this car now, and every time we went over a speed bump, I shuddered.

At first, I placed her in front of the mirror beside the bed. My child, always curious at new additions to the home, ran over to the bag. “Don’t touch it!” I said, and he froze in shock. “That bag is very dangerous!” He nodded solemnly and backed away. All day I was thinking about the bag, and I realised I would not be able to sleep with her beside me, beside a mirror. I’m Jamaican. We have stories about that.

So instead, I put the ashes on the top of my bookshelf in the living room, and now she’s watching over the mundane events of her family. Just last year, she was in the same room, alive and well, laughing at my son because it was his first birthday party and he was showing off in front of her. She was on the sofa. She ate, she chatted to everyone. She was normal. She’s returned now, abnormally. There is just something off about ashes.

When someone is buried, they have the luxury of the mysterious. They’re somewhere in the ground where we can’t see them, sealed with granite, the summary of their lives inscribed in gold poetry. Their loved ones can set up camp around the grave and imagine them there in their casket clothes, unchanged and beautiful, perhaps a return to old health and youth. They are frozen in their past. Once, when I attended the funeral of a church member, I wandered through the cemetery as is my custom, as the attendants sang hymns around the open grave. I saw a massive burial site for a group of children who had all died on the same night. I could only imagine the horrific event that led to five siblings of the same family suddenly dying like that, and the grave was enshrined with favourite comic books and toys of each of the children, all preserved behind glass. The items were old, from the early nineties, and I was left with no other option but to imagine them all playing with those toys beneath the ground, adorned in the fashions of their time, still potentially alive somewhere.

In another cemetery that I’ve visited a few times before, there is a huge plot dedicated to a woman called Veronica. Her family created a walled, marble garden for her. It’s breath-taking and indulgent, but the grandness of the site means visitors can only picture her as an angel, perched on the bench at the edge of the gleaming arches, a lost beauty preserved in death.

Some things have been preserved for me. Good memories, my pain of her sudden loss, and the bad things, the negative events that opened a wedge between us in the last few years of her life. I won’t gaslight myself. I know things with her weren’t great, but those things feel insignificant now, which has surprised me because when she was alive, they were my entire world.

There is one memory I have from childhood, when we all lived in one house in Nunhead. The phone rang and my mum picked it up. The conversation was brief, and afterwards she sat back down at the dining table with me and resumed her breakfast. “Your grandma’s died,” she said, and then she burst into tears, still cutting her eggs with a trembling hand, staring at her toast with red, glassy eyes. I ran over to her, and so did my sister, and we rubbed her back, and she nodded and told us she would be fine. Moments later, breakfast had finished and the phone rang again. I could tell from the loud, crackled static that disturbed the silence of the living room that it was my aunty calling from Italy, where she’s lived my entire life. There were a few hushed words exchanged between them. And then my mum threw back her head and cackled. I was horrified and appalled. I knew instantly that they were laughing about their mother, but was too young to understand why.

As I grew older, my mum was unapologetically open about her childhood, and the hell her parents had put them all through. They were stalwart Jamaicans, respected members of their local Seventh-day Adventist Church, but they presided over a house of horrors, welding pain into their five children. My mum had cried that morning because it was natural to cry when someone of that proximity dies, but her laugh was one of relief. The shadow of her childhood had lessened. And as an adult, she was obsessed with wanting to be anything but her own mother, and all her parental choices were made as a defiance of some kind, a comparison to ensure she was never that bad.

My sisters and I existed beneath shadows of our own, and sometimes, she really hurt us, and caused us great suffering. But since she died, none of us has been able to throw our heads back and laugh, none of us desire relief. We want her here with us again, we want to do things over, to redirect all our lives with the knowledge of how it feels to have her disappear without warning, and see if we can all work things out together. Even though I think she missed the mark sometimes, it’s clear that she fulfilled her goal of not being like her own mother. Today, her children are heartbroken. And now that I’m a mother myself, and have struggled with motherhood and with the reality of how much my life has changed and been restricted with parenthood, I can sympathise with the struggles she endured, and the burdens she carried whilst still trying to produce a motherhood that made sense to her. The legacy she has left me with is a hope that one day, my child, and whatever children I have later, will mourn for me too, and want to tell me well done.

If people bagged up their dead loved ones and stuffed them in a wardrobe somewhere so they could rot and liquefy and contaminate their homes, their imaginations would shatter. Now that I can lift my mother and physically hold her, and feel the weight of her in ashes, I am a little wistful that the mystery of her state is not something I can bask in. Sometimes my eyes glance to the bookshelf, and I feel the weight of her in my mind, and I turn away from it and instead focus on the photograph I found above her bed on the Friday after she died. It featured in the slideshow that we played at her funeral, and it was the photograph that broke me and forced me to cry. That photo offers some mystery. I can return to that day, imagine another her and another me, and pretend that things had transpired differently between us.