Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

The story of a daughters love.

The receptionist buzzed to give me a heads up that my dad was on his way in.  My office was just off the lobby in the purchasing department so I stood up from my desk and peeked out the window and yup, there he was.  His old baby blue Mercedes was pulling up to the red painted curb right at the front door where he always parks.

I met him at the glass double doors in the lobby and quietly said, “Dad, what are you doing here?”   Trying to be patient with him but he’d been warned many times that it wasn’t ok to visit me at my office.  I’d already missed so much work during mom’s long illness.  I needed to get back to normal now that she was gone, but he is so lonely and doesn’t know what to do with himself.

“Mom’s in the car.”  He said sheepishly.

“What do you mean ‘Mom’s in the car’?”  I retorted with hands and shoulders held up in exasperation, keeping my voice down but wanting to be firm with him.

“She’s in the car.”  He’s actually scuffing the toe of his sneaker and looking down with his hands in his pockets, knowing he is in trouble.

“Where in the car?”  I said with a parental tone to my voice.

“Up front, with me, where she always sits.”  A bit of pride and a mischievous hint to his voice.

“Dad!  I told you Ron would pick her up.  Why did you do it?”  I wined.

“I just couldn’t leave her there.”  He said.

“So, now what?” By this time my frustration was no longer veiled. But it was more than that…

His only answer to me was “Give me your keys and I’ll put her in your car.”

“That is exactly why I’d asked Ron to pick her up so I wouldn’t be in this position, Dad. Fine.”  With a heavy sigh, I turned, walked back into my office and got my keys to hand to him.   A kiss on the cheek and he was off.  I never wanted to be alone with the ashes, it gave me the creeps just thinking about it.

After a very long battle with bone cancer and almost a year and a half in the hospital her body finally gave up.  Before she died, she told me that my Dad would drive me crazy and that I’d have to be firm with him or he’d show up daily at my office.  As much as my heart ached for him feeling alone, I had to work, I had responsibilities.  I had a life.

Later that afternoon I walked out to the parking lot, jumped in my little white BMW with the red leather seats and started it up to back out when I remembered, Mom!  Where did he put her?  I looked in the front seat and the back seat then jumped out and opened the trunk and there she was amidst all my other stuff.

I unfolded the small paper bag and peeked inside.  There was a brown plastic box a bit smaller than a shoe box inside and gingerly I slid open the top and found a clear plastic zip lock bag filled with the white, grey and beige bone chips and ash.

“Hi, Mom.” I said softly.  I both missed her horribly and was also happy it was over, her long and painful death.  I held her in my arms having to make a decision.  I left her there in the trunk.

I slid the top back on to her temporary home and put it back in the brown paper bag, folded the top of the bag down and laid it carefully on its side.  Seeing the ashes immediately brought tears to my eyes, I swallowed the lump in my throat, looked around the parking lot, hesitated, taking a deep breath, swallowed my tears and slammed the trunk closed, got back in the car and drove home to be mom to my own kids.

I left her there.  For almost a year I left her in my trunk.  I showed her to anyone interested in seeing what ashes look like.

In all the years they were married my Dad had never left her alone.    He’d drove her to work most mornings, then pick her up for lunch and again at 5 o’clock…there he was waiting for her.  She wanted more for me…she wanted me to have freedom of decision, freedom of time.

I left her in the trunk so that she could go to lunch with me everyday.  So she could vicariously enjoy a more pampered life.  I left her there so she was always with me.

She’d worked every day of her life since she had been 14 years old and ended up being the matriarch of our family.  The one everyone turned to for a mature and sensible solution to family drama and trauma.  A working mother of three. She carried the weight of caring for her parents, siblings and extended family as well as her own.  They weren’t an easy group, none of them, none of us, and my mom was the sane one, the one that caused my cousins to mention to me that I had a great mother, even my cousins from my Dad’s side.

Even at work, she was the go to office lady.  She was the business manager at a large Italian owned car dealership in both New Jersey and California.  The typical language used in dealerships stopped at her door.  She ran a very tight ship and was respected by all.

She raised me to expect more from life and I got it. Many months later our interior designer was telling me that her son Christopher was starting a new business.  He loved luxury cars but of course couldn’t  afford one so he thought of starting a car detailing business.

I liked Chris and loved a clean car so I called him to make arrangements for him to take me on as a customer.  He came on time, came to my office and got my keys, drove the car to his house where he did his work in his own garage.  A few hours later he returned it sparkling clean, I paid him and off he went to his next job.

As I left at 5 that afternoon, I thought I’d check his work.  The exterior was sparkling, the interior looked great,  and then I opened the trunk.  Spotless!  Perfect job, I was so happy with his work.  Half way home it hit me.  “Mom!”  I screamed.  I drove directly to Chris’ house but no one was home.  This was long before cell phones so you could never reach anyone when you really needed them.

My mind went to horrible places.  What if he’d thrown the brown paper bag away thinking it was trash?  Now she’s sitting in the bottom of a trash can or worse.  Could I live with myself if she ended up at the dump?  Oh, my god, my heart was racing, I was crying, and at the same time I realized that she and I would have laughed till we cried at this story.

I drove home and for the next hour I continued to call Chris over and over and I called his mom, Pam, at the office and at home.  I couldn’t live with myself  if Mom ended up at the dump. I couldn’t live with myself.   I had to get her back.

Finally, Chris called and it turned out that he had put everything that was in my trunk into a box and had only forgotten to put the box back in my trunk.  I couldn’t tell him why it was so important, why I was so freaked.  He was too young to even imagine what could have been in that bag that he’d moved.

That night Chris brought over the box of my belongings from my trunk  and that’s where she stayed for safe keeping. I could rest easy, she was home.

A month later we were up in Ron’s brothers prop plane.  I held the clear plastic bag tightly in my hand, holding some back to keep and share with my father.  Ron popped the window open for me as we flew over Natural Bridges Park in Santa Cruz, my Mom’s favorite place, where the Monarch’s visit every October on a layover on their annual journey.  Most of the ashes flew into the crashing waves yet still I screamed, sputtered, shook and cried as some of the ashes flew into my face.  When we got home that evening I needed to find a permanent home for what was left of her.

On a recent trip to Amsterdam, Ron had brought home a beautiful hand painted ginger jar.  I took a velvet bag with a draw string meant for a bottle of good Scotch and placed the clear plastic bag of ashes that I’d saved inside.  Dad had decided that it was just too odd for him to keep the ashes.

A year and a half after my mom had died we moved to Singapore for Ron’s job and I found the perfect place for Mom.  Yes, we brought her with us…she’d never had a passport and had never traveled.

We had a beautiful flat in a high rise with Italian red marble floors and 5,000 sf to fill and make homey.  We bought an antique Persian rug during the embargo era and placed a very large glass table atop.  Her ginger jar sat in the middle of the table so that she could enjoy the rug and the view.

Now she resides in a cabinet in my dining room at our home in the desert of Southern California.

I learned that never did I need to savor those ashes in order to be reminded of her.  She lives on in my heart and I see her qualities of confidence and wit reflected in my granddaughters eyes.