Golf course, cat litter or cupboard? Our ashes end up in odd places
I put the idea to X’s son. It would be appropriate, I said. And it would be righteous. So he gave us a cigar tube containing some of X’s ashes to spread on the sacred river where we once went to tell our best lies. “Come on, gentlemen,” I insisted. “Fuel up the utes. This is a pilgrimage.”
We travelled to the river and stood upwind as I spoke gentle words about our friend, and uncorked the tube and upended it and shook it … and shook it again … and … X was always an impulsive man, and we were expecting him to erupt earthward with reverse volcanic vigour.
But nothing came out of the tube. Instead of hearing obsequies for X, I was fusilladed with snidery. Once again, I had lost a friend, seemed to be the gist of it. To this day, none of us know where the ashes went. Or if there were any to begin with. Whether a joke was played, or a mistake was made. Maybe our teary eyes missed a smoky vestige of our mate as it floated away on the breeze. Suspicion weaves its glacial way among us still – but nothing is said about it now.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
About 70 per cent of Australians are cremated, leaving many of us with an ashes tale to tell. I know of four siblings who drove for a day to launch their father’s ashes off a mountain he’d loved. They got there without him. “Didn’t you bring him?” “No. You had the urn.” “Is it still at Mum’s?” “You dropkick. You left him at Mum’s? She’ll use him as cat litter.”
His ashes now abide on a shelf in a garage awaiting the sacred safari that will end on a caressing wind. But it’s hard to co-ordinate four busy lives, and my guess is he’ll end up in landfill with asbestos, mattresses and lemon rinds.
Who hasn’t felt that “Ohhh … shiiit” slo-mo burst of guilt when opening a cupboard and finding a forgotten urn? A brother you’d sworn to reunite with a lake, river, beach or forest – still cooped up with Twister and Monopoly and the 500-piece jigsaw of a castle on the Danube in which a line of Dukes has doubtless festered? Tons of our fricasseed beloved must rest on dark shelves in this town.
A friend’s father was a golfer of note and had asked that his ashes be spread on the ninth green at this country’s most prestigious club. The club informed him that, even though the ex-member was a tip-top chap with a single-digit handicap and a gunbarrel drive, its course was not a repository for human remains. My friend took the refusal in his stride – or his strides, really. While enjoying his next round, he wriggled and waggled his way across the ninth green as he shook his dad’s ashes from his trouser legs like Steve McQueen sprinkling tunnel dirt around Stalag Luft 3 in The Great Escape.
And why should our hearts be subject to the whims of our bureaucracies? Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens has long been a spiritual home for Blundstoned suburban green thumbs, and many gardeners on winter’s cusp express a desire that their ashes garnish a bloom or leaven a bed in that approximate Eden.
Officially, the garden’s overlords strictly forbid the scattering of ashes there. But on any given weekend, you can observe the covertly bereaved, stiff-backed with performative insouciance, sniffing dahlias and fondling Bunyah pines while mumbling eulogies and dribbling the fairy dust of dead hubbies from takeaway coffee cups, or surreptitiously fanning a miasma of Nanna onto a poinsettia.
I know several people who’ve “Dropped off an aunt at the gardens”, as the euphemism has it. You wonder why it blooms so well? It is fed by its fans. The hearts that have loved that garden best are stealthily empowering it now. And there’s something simultaneously poetic and utilitarian in that. It’s rumoured the chief gardener is chosen, these days, for an ability to tell an aunt-gorged perennial from an impoverished specimen on a horse manure diet.
Of course, the most hallowed ground in Australia is the MCG. After a game, crowds cavort on its turf while clandestine ceremonies are performed and filmed on phones in their midst. And it lifts the heart of many an AFL footballer to know that the berserk pie-scoff leaning across the fence calling him a carthorse conceived by a coward in round five might well be the grit on his mouthguard by round eight.
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