Blow Back
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
My Uncle's Leavings
The tall sprinkle-tube is printed in soft pinks and mauves, with a rainbow curving into the gloom. My uncle's ashes sit on a shelf in my garage, at eye-level. He died at the age of 88. It’s been 8 years since his death and subsequent cremation.
Despite how it looks, I’m not clinging to his remains, nor am I reluctant to part with them; it’s more a lack of inspiration. Maybe part of the problem is the word remains, it suggests a certain permanency. I decide to rename them ‘leavings’ to help them out the door.
A half-hearted search online reveals far too many options for turning this transitional object into something ornamental: a diamond, a playable record, a tattoo with a dash of ash, or perhaps a Xmas tree decoration.
Never married and with no children, I am his closest relative. As a young teenager I spent my school holidays sweating alongside him as we renovated his various rental properties. In the late 70s everything was done by hand; the sanding, gap-filling, undercoating and finally the painting. Climbing up and down ladders, balancing on high trestles while carrying a paint pot in one hand and a brush in the other, not only gave me pocket money ($20 a day I think) but some useful skills I hoped never to fall back on in later life. So arduous was the work, I expected my right arm to either drop off, or double in size like a fiddler-crab’s. At lunchtime we would pause to drive round to the local pub for a pie.
Curious about the world and the way it was, my uncle was a hoarder of books, newspapers, and magazines. Always reading, digesting, and exploring – he once said he wanted to write a book about Everything. The idea of me becoming his research assistant was briefly floated. With the arrival of the computer age that job never eventuated.
Instead, he taught me how to paint and decorate interiors. I became skilled in the restoration of wooden floors. Eventually I graduated to the gravity-defying task of papering ceilings; this often resulted in great lengths of sticky wet paper peeling off and falling on me.
My father died six months after my uncle, strangely he too was 88; his box soon doubled the stash of ash on my garage shelf. I don't think any other relatives gave this a thought.
It’s now present time and my mother has recently died. Surprisingly, or expectedly, she too was 88 years old. Her box squeezed onto the now crowded shelf. I am officially the Keeper of the Crypt. With three boxes, it definitely looks like I am hoarding their leavings. A friend makes a passing comment about the ‘energetic heaviness’ of keeping cremains on the property. Another quick search online reveals that some cultures consider it bad luck to keep ashes, because it encourages a focus on the past and slows forward momentum—gasp! I instantly feel weighted down with three anchors dragging behind me. Equally alarmed and inspired – I resolve to move them on as quickly, creatively and honorably as possible. Starting with Uncle John.
Instead of focusing on the problem of what to do with them – I let my mind drift back in time to one of my favourite memories with my uncle.
His parents (my grandparents) retired to their seaside cottage at Leithfield Beach in the late 1960s. In those days, Leithfield was a tiny beach settlement so far from civilisation that they barely had electricity. Instead they had outhouses, milk in billy-cans and a party-line phone system.
The heavy Bakelite phone sat on its own piece of furniture; a raised stand with a built-in seat. The phone had one big knob on it that you rotated clockwise to create a long or short ring. The pattern of rings would tinkle on every phone up and down the street. Each house had its own call pattern e.g. long-long-short. Good etiquette required that you answer the phone only when you heard your particular ring. However every time it rang, if my grandmother wasn’t watching, I would quietly lift the receiver and listen in on the neighbours' conversations; it was a no-no, but of course, everyone did it.
My grandmother loved collecting colourful rocks, and the driveway was lined with sizable boulders brought back from hers and Grandad’s river wanderings. It was a heavenly place next to an ocean too wild for swimming. Behind the house, wind would wheeze through the giant pines; a shelter from shore breezes and flying sand. An easy path from the back garden led through the trees and over a low dune to the empty beach.
For holidays at the beach I was conveyed in my mother’s pale blue Vauxhall Victor. The journey seemed to take half the day. Except for that one time.
In his forties, Uncle John bought himself a bright red E-type Jag. 8-year-old me was delirious with joy to be told I would be travelling out to Leithfield with him in his fast new sportscar. I watched the needle climb over 90mph still begging him to go faster. Consequently, the ride was over way too soon.
And so it happened that the idea of scattering his ashes at this remote beach from my childhood came to mind.
I pull in off the road parking under those same giant pines. I’m relieved there is nobody around. It feels a little illicit like I’m disposing of a dead body. The cumbersome 3kg sprinkle tube is hefted into my daypack and I set off through the trees to the beach. Deserted, the sand stretches away in both directions. Damp crescents show a retreating tide.
Intending to record the occasion with my phone, I am already imagining the wind pulling the ashes like a lovely scarf of dust as they curl from the tube and float out over the foam-topped waves; capturing a tasteful moment I can share with the family.
I get in position; the heavy tube clutched against my chest with one hand, my camera now recording in the other. The tube is unwieldy to upend – especially using one hand.
Two things happen in quick succession. Cremains fly out in clumps, but the wind whips around tossing handfuls of pulverised bone into my eyes. A shriek of shock escapes me. Suddenly a rogue wave surges up the beach catching me unawares and I’m ankle-deep in water in my shoes and socks. My feet sink into the wet sand. I am shrieking and crying with laughter at the absurdity of it.
Half of the desiccations have consolidated in the base of the tube and seem to be set like concrete. I’m worried a dog walker or beach wanderer might appear. A few doubts niggle as to the legality of what I'm doing. I panic and start thumping the upside-down tube onto the wet sand. As if I have summoned them, people materialise in the distance.
The cardboard rim is now soggy. Waves are sweeping in. Uncle John’s leavings have still not gone. I notice the texture is more grit-like than ash. There is no chance it will waft out like smoke; this is more like gritty sand and something you might use to build a foundation.
Suddenly the last chunk falls out making a little turret on the wet sand. I step back in relief as another wave knocks into it. The tiny sandcastle dissolves before my eyes and suddenly it has gone.
My single burst of laughter feels like a gift that was hidden with his leavings – a sacred moment for me to find when I was ready to release them. What comes to mind is a favourite poem I found in my teens:
Oh, what blind joy
What hunger to use up
the air we breathe,
the mouth, the eye, the hand.
What biting itch
to spend absolutely all of ourselves
in one single burst of laughter.
Oh, this impudent, insulting death
that assassinates us from afar.
Over the pleasure that we take in dying
for a cup of tea...
for a faint caress.
—excerpt from "Death Without End" by Jose Gorostiza
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