If you’re looking for sound, practical advice on what happens when an elderly parent dies – the so-called “sadmin” – then you shouldn’t come to me because all the bits that went OK, my sister did, and all the bits that went unaccountably awry were when I got involved. If, however, you are looking for advice on the ceremony of ash-scattering, then I have loads, all of it learned five to 10 minutes after it would have been good to know.
We’d actually planned this pretty carefully, insofar as we knew where we wanted to go – a cottage our mum rented for years, which is still empty. When my mum died, a friend gave me a lovely hanky, so I took that, in case I got upset. It was a beautiful day; I had my cherished loved ones, a bottle of water and my vape. What could possibly go wrong?
OK, so the house was empty, but the one next door still has a really nice neighbour in it, and we didn’t think till we were at the gate how she’d feel about this. Would she want to help? Do people get squeamish? Do Christians have a view that is different from an atheist’s? We should really have looked this up before we left.
There were guinea fowl running around the garden, which was new and a bit mysterious (what was it about my mother that had kept them away? I mean, she was strong medicine but she was always kind to birds), and we hadn’t looked that up, either: “Are cremains safe around fowl?” It was quite windy, and the ash went everywhere, including in my eye. I saw a friend later who said she was sure she’d swallowed a bit of her dad. You can’t really Google how you’ll feel about that. I suppose ChatGPT might know.
I did not get upset because there was always a fresh, practical question – does anyone have a wipe? No, but I have a hanky – and memories streaking across the horizon like rabbits, incredibly vivid, then gone: how annoyed our mother used to get by the sound of the M1; how doughtily she would defend the rambler’s right of way against farmers trying to plant things; the way she would look at the landscape and say, “One day soon, all this will be town”, betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of green belt legislation and the role of agriculture in the British economy.
Is it what she would have wanted? I think she’d have preferred a bit more solemnity, a bit less of a caper. But we can always go again. Nobody ever warns you how much there is to scatter.