Carli Cutchin
Slow Burn
Before my mother died of lung disease in 2000, she asked that her ashes be scattered. Where, she didn’t say, but she loved the California coastal redwoods where we lived when I was young and she loved the sea. Maybe she imagined my father and I would drive her remains up to the fern-strewn redwoods and cast her body into the sandy loam, or rent a boat and toss her into the waves, a fitting ending for a woman captivated by waters which, non-swimmer that she was, threatened peril. At last, she’d get a good swim in.
Such a simple wish, the wish to be scattered. In a culture with no fixed funerary rites, the wishes of the dying ought to be paramount. Yet in twenty-four years I haven’t carried out my mother’s request. I was twenty-three when she passed; I’m forty-seven now. This is the only child’s burden: knowing you alone must tend to your dead. Every time I think about my mother’s ashes, I’m paralyzed by indecision and grief.
I don’t know how to let my mother go.
My mother and I had a classic codependent relationship. When I was small and sensed I’d upset her, I used to write my mother notes. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I’d fill an entire 8 ½ x 11 sheet with the words. My father, a hard-working machinist, was around, but he was quiet and passive and exerted less influence on me than my mother, who was caring but also headstrong, and ill both in body and mind. When I was a child, my mother sang silly songs and read Laura Ingalls Wilder to me every night before bed. As I grew bigger, so grew her addictions and autoimmune disease. As a teen, I was the sole witness to the long hours she passed in a Xanax-induced stupor, rocking back and forth in her wooden rocker and staring into the soupy yellow air. My mother smoked three packs of nonfilter cigarettes a day without ever opening the windows of our mobile home.
I’m sorry, Mom, but I don’t know what to do with you. For the past twenty-four years, I’ve hauled from apartment to apartment a box labeled ASHES EXTREMEMELY FRAGILE. When my father died in 2006, I added his urn to the box. My parents loved each other fiercely. Since my father left no instructions as to the fate of his remains, I figured that whatever I did with them, my parents should stay together, ashy bodies mingling for all time.
Extremely fragile. Detritus themselves, human ashes can’t really be destroyed, at least not by the movers at Lulu’s Hauling Company. So what is fragile here, other than my own grieving psyche?
In my thirties, I married and had twin daughters. When the twins were young, I ended up storing the ashes in the closet of their room. When I told this to a friend, she actually winced. We don’t have much room, and after all the twins aren’t using the closet, I explained. But there is something strange and possibly selfish about shunting one’s dead parents into a space occupied by one’s children. Maybe deep down, I didn’t want my parents to be alone; nor did I want to tend to them myself.
* * *
What does it mean to honor the dead? I don’t mean the spirits of the dead but specifically their bodies, the physical traces they leave, traces which may evoke ambivalent responses in the living. Disgust. Fear. Duty. Longing.
My husband once told me he likes the idea of having a sky burial in Tibet. In this ritual, a yak carries the corpse onto a mountaintop, where it is left to be eaten by carrion birds. I said this sounded like burial tourism. My husband laughed and agreed. In the United States, death presents one more choice for the consumer. A choice that can feel overwhelming both for the dying and their loved ones.
It's not just a corpse the dead leave behind. Their traces linger on objects, too. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet discovered physical traces of the dead in the Archives Nationales in Paris. In these archives, Michelet breathed in the “dust” the dead had left on their documents—the skin particles they’d shed. He describes this process in Volume II of Histoire de France:
as I breathed their dust, I saw them rise up. They rose from the sepulchre . . . as
in the Last Judgement of Michelangelo or in the Dance of Death. This frenzied
dance . . . . I have tried to reproduced in [my] work. (trans. Carolyn Steedman)
Michelet’s act of inhalation gives life, for as he breathes in the dust of the dead, he sees them rise up, take shape and form, become real once more. Not simply the content of the archives but their physical makeup facilitates a kind of remembering that is oddly tangible, physiological. As historian Carolyn Steedman observes in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, for Michelet, dust is the opposite of waste, “or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. [Dust] is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone.
“The fundamental lessons of physiology, or cell-theory and of neurology [have] to do with this ceaseless making and unmaking, the movement and transmutation of one thing into another.”
Next to the box containing my parents’ urns sit a box of their old belongings. The quilts my mother hand-made, the woolen pants my father wore in the Navy.
Everything in this box reeks of stale cigarette smoke. Over the years, my mother’s breath—her smoky exhalations—seeped into fabric, upholstery, the Bibles she kept on a side table next to her rocker. Today, decades later, every scrap I’ve saved holds in its fibers the smoke that was once inside her lungs.
For all its association with the disease that ultimately killed my mother, the stench reminds me that, as Michelet has it, the dead never leave us completely.
I possess a pulmonary archive.
A mother returned to me, in smoke.
* * *
And yet, I used to hate that smell and the embarrassment it brought. I remember once, I tried to return a pair of jeans at the mall—I was nineteen and still living with my parents. The pretty salesgirl didn’t even have to put the jeans to her nose. The stink radiated off them as soon as they were out of the bag. She looked me up and down, and I knew she saw it all: the trailer park, the depressed, chain-smoking mother, the factory-worker father. “I’ll return them this time,” she allowed.
* * *
In one of these boxes is the black suede purse my mother carried with her everywhere, carried to lunch with her the day she died. It’s exactly as it was that day. Her government-issued ID is still in her wallet and medications lurk deep inside the bag’s folds. In the wallet she kept a member card from the National Smokers’ Alliance with her name on it.
My mother was vigilant lest the state take away her right to light up when and where she chose. Despite her vigilance, the worst came to pass. In early 1995, one of the nation’s toughest smoking laws took effect in California. At the time, we were living at Royal Palm Mobile Home Park in the Sacramento Valley, just yards away from a state highway. My mother hated the semis that thundered by, shaking our mobile home. But she hated that new law more. It meant we could no longer enjoy leisurely dinners at Denny’s after my father came home from work. Smoking was now banned in restaurants. From the vantage point of 2024, this feels like a good idea. For my mother, who struggled to go more than a few moments between cigarettes, it was a disaster.
“We’ve got to move,” my mother insisted. My father wasn’t so sure, but my mother wore him down. Within a year, we’d relocated to Nevada, where you could smoke anywhere you wanted—bars, restaurants, grocery stores. Casino bars. Casino restaurants.
* * *
The Christmas before my mother died, my parents and I had dinner at the Nugget Casino, one of two luminous towers in the Sparks desert. My naturally slim mother was perhaps three hundred pounds now, and barely able to speak, whether from the emphysema or booze or pills or Pneumonia—she’d been sick seven times in the past year—I don’t know. Deep, rattling coughing fits interrupted the few semi-coherent words she managed to get out. The silence at our table was heavy, oppressive, even as nearby slot machines dinged and jangled and belched out prize tokens.
My mother was dying, but I refused to see this. I was a senior in college, majoring in English and getting good grades. I lived in an apartment across town. On weekends, I partied with my English-major friends. We mixed Margaritas and danced to The Chemical Brothers. I had a boyfriend, a poet who wore Doc Martens and a wallet chain that swung at his hip when he walked. I felt free, on the cusp of a fresh, bold life lived on my own terms.
Two months after that silent dinner at the Nugget, I stopped by a drugstore in south Reno. I wanted to get my mother a card. Denial has a ready accomplice in the Hallmark aisle, where the range of greetings are comfortingly circumscribed. The options are, Get Well Soon or I’m Sorry for Your Loss. Back in my car, I unwrapped the Get Well Soon card I’d chosen and rummaged in the glove box for a pen. My plan had been to write, “Jesus doesn’t give us more than we can bear” inside the card. Suddenly, though, the spelling of “bear” eluded me. Could it be bare? I’ve never been a good speller and besides, the meanings of bear and bare have always bled into each other in my mind. One involves carrying, as a burden; the other nakedness, vulnerability. Exposure. In the end, I chose “bear” (I think) and licked the envelope shut.
As soon as I opened the door of my parents’ single-wide on Kietzke Lane—Dad must have been at work at the factory—I wanted to turn back around. No longer was I accustomed to the scud of smoke that greeted me as soon as I stepped inside.
“Hi, Mom,” I called. “I’m down here,” my mother called back hoarsely. For years it had been her habit to retreat to the toilet after coffee and stay there for a long time. She had Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
I could have waited. I could have waited. I had all the time in the world. “I’ve got to go, Mom,” I called from the hallway. “I’m leaving something for you on the washing machine.”
I placed the card on the washer.
And I was gone.
* * *
Dad’s call came through in the middle of the night. “Mama passed away tonight.” Mama. With me, Dad always used this word, even though I hadn’t called her Mama since I was small.
But Mama, Mom, could not be dead. I knew for a fact she’d gone out to lunch with my father that very afternoon. This wasn’t how dying was supposed to work. There was supposed to be a hospital stay, perhaps multiple hospital stays, a clear prognosis, and, when hope was lost, hospice care. (It occurs to me now my mother might have received a prognosis and simply kept it from me.)
My mother had died at home in her sleep. Dad wanted to know if I wanted to see her. I knew at once the answer: No. Her soul had departed her body, I reasoned; what was there to see?
But somewhere inside, I knew if I drove to my parent’s mobile home and knelt down next to her massive, swollen form, if I caressed the hands that once tied my shoes and kissed the lips that used to kiss my bumps and scrapes, it would destroy the escape hatch that had opened in my brain and was offering me a way out, namely the possibility that none of this was real.
I hear that which we call ashes isn’t a soft powder so much as a brittle mix of bone and grit. In her memoir Traveling Mercies, Lamott takes a boat out on the San Francisco Bay and opens a box with her friend Pammy inside. She tries to scatter Pammy’s ashes, but they stick to her sweater and fingers, and she actually licks them, tastes “what was left of her after all that was clean and alive had been consumed, burned away.”
I like to think I’m no longer in denial. But if I were prepared to face my mother’s death, wouldn’t I have the courage to open her urn? I’m not yet ready to touch or taste my mother. I can’t tell if this is because I need more time away from her, free from her, or because I can’t yet face the fact that she is truly gone.
* * *
For years, my mother was afraid I would forsake her. She downright forbade me from going away to college. She was sick; she needed me. So instead of moving to Southern California, where I dreamed of enrolling in a small Christian college, I stayed put and attended the University of Nevada. In the end, it was my mother who disappeared. Her ashes are what I have. They are also the ultimate token of her goneness. The keepsakes all smell like the tobacco that killed her. Every memento conveys death.
When my daughters were six, I found my father’s wallet deep inside a box. Like my mother’s purse, it was just as it was the day he died. Inside were four dollar bills. I gave two each to my daughters. “It’s your inheritance,” I joked. They were happy.
Soon after, our landlord allowed us access to our home’s unfinished attic. I moved the boxes up there. Now they sit under the rafters.
I tell my daughters their grandparents would have adored them. I show them pictures of Grandma Vickie and Grandpa Ray. Mostly, they are pictures of a younger Grandma and Grandpa, before they got sick. Grandma Vickie has hair down to her waist and Grandpa Ray sports a thick black beard. In the background you can see the redwoods my mother loved.
At times I think of finding a cemetery plot and burying the ashes in the ground, so I can place peonies or pansies there on birthdays and holidays. So my grief can have a locus, a station. At these times, I tell myself it’s my mother’s doing, the fact I can’t bring myself to scatter her. To lose her a final time. In this sense, erecting a gravestone might be the ultimate act of co-dependency. There are no self-help books that show you how to remedy such a situation.
Whatever I decide in the end, the first step is to open the urn.
Carli Cutchin is a writer and disability advocate based in Berkeley, CA. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from New York University and a Master of Theological Studies from Pacific School of Religion. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Ms. Magazine, Electric Literature, DAME, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/carlicutchin/.