Bonney Castle, Hiram College’s English home, is perfect for Kirsten Parkinson’s cremains

Hiram College website screen shot

It can be difficult to write an essay that has universal appeal. Trying to do so can cause a cerebral hemorrhaging. Or, at least a bad headache. That is why Kirsten Parkinson’s ability to make it look painless in The Family Cremains should be celebrated and, if you are a writer, studied.

Do so while you still can.

Parkinson’s essay, in The University of Tulsa’s spring/summer issue of its Nimrod International Journal with the theme Endings and Beginnings, should appeal to anyone who falls into one or more of the following categories:

• Is breathing
• Recognizes he/she/they might not be breathing forever
• Has preplanned for death or intends to so, as it suggests responsibleness
• And yet procrastinates when it comes to confronting this subject
• Even so, can have a sense of humor about the inevitable/fatal end
• Has family, often one with issues, interested in whether one lives or dies
• Would like to learn the difference between ashes and cremains
• Values learning alternatives to cremation—if not to death itself

As a reader will discover forthwith from her essay, Parkinson is a bit of a procrastinator. It clearly is an inherited characteristic. As Nimrod’s Eilis O’Neal writes in her Editor’s Note: “Endings and beginnings have power—in narratives and in our daily lives.” Not everyone, however, can translate those life forces onto the page as well as Parkinson. And even fewer can make procrastination, a characteristic that could be viewed negatively, feel as natural as—dying—and do so with a leavening humor near hilarity.

She introduces her family, which includes her late great-aunt Betty whom she explains “rode around in the trunk of my grandparents’ big blue Buick sedan for more than three years after her death.” Fortunately for Aunt Betty, whom Parkinson imagines “resting among the jumper cables and a bottle of wiper fluid,” and those who occupied the cabin of the car, her late aunt had been transformed into cremated remains that had been placed in a funeral-home cardboard box. Less costly than a casket and a better fit for a trunk. The family was waiting until Aunt Betty’s “big brother Bobby followed her into the hereafter.” When he did, they inserted her box into the foot of her brother’s coffin.

It was a unique killing two (old) birds with one stone.

“We mean well,” Parkinson explained of her clan. “But this neglectful approach to remains is commonplace in my family.”

For any family it is possible for cremains to present logistical challenges. In Parkinson’s immediate family this included how to dispose of her cat’s ashes. I can relate. The cremains of three of our beloved cats rest in plastic bags in tins behind individual photos of each cat on a high shelf in living room bookshelves in our condo. We, too, mean well. We intend to place the ashes with our own on two shelves of a small, single columbarium that already has been set in place next to my buried parents in my Oklahoma hometown. I fear misadventures may occur before we all are reunited in Nowata Memorial Park Cemetery. (Feel free to come and visit us sometime.)

Parkinson relates misadventures beyond Aunt Betty’s that have occurred in her own family but favors cremation—“the Biblical idea that we will all return to dust”—over embalming and taking up more of the earth’s limited space and unleashing the poison that keeps the grass green around graves. Since “God is a rather nebulous entity,” whom Hiram College Professor of English Parkinson thinks “could reconstitute a cremated body just as well as a badly decomposed one . . . if he/she/it exists and can perform the miracles of resurrecting souls,” Parkinson is good to go.

Tracing the history of burial as “standard practice in American culture through the first part of the 20th century,” as one might expect a teacher would do, Parkinson goes on to explain other important pieces of dying about which some would rather not think. I mean, how do we know we have the ashes of our family member—human or feline? She has thought through and explains the options and knows that she does not want a traditional burial. Though she seems to favor cremation she kind of likes the idea a “natural burial, which means no embalming, no elaborate grave markers . . .”

Getting to life’s ending and its inherent challenges—the right words can escape even a word master like Parkinson and ashes can end up in untoward places by windy accident—can be difficult and thought provoking. Parkinson makes the point that writers and philosophers such as St. Augustine, William Wordsworth, St. Thomas Aquinas, William Godwin, Thomas Laqueur and others help us to appreciate what we owe the dead—those that may be nothing now but were “something” when alive.

As much as Parkinson respects this concept, her portion of her mother’s ashes, which were divided into fourths, remained tucked away in her home office until she, her husband and their daughter poured them into Lake Erie—her mother loved the water—five years after her mother had died: “I liked that the water would disperse my mother’s ashes and that she could eventually be anywhere and everywhere.” The specifics that Parkinson imagined create a powerful image, much better than being let down in a coffin into a concrete vault in the cold, hard ground. Yet I did feel somehow let down.

I wanted the essay to go on and on and never end. I suppose that is my “amen” to the Parkinson essay, which could, of course, not go on forever. My reaction may have grown out of a fear of endings, especially ultimate ones such as death.

But, like Kirsten Parkinson herself, I have spent a lifetime writing endings. Death will be just one more, if mysterious. The only thing I know for sure is that my ending will not be as good as the one she crafted from letters, turning her words into images capable of making a person laugh even at death and especially at themselves.

NOTE: In an earlier version of this post, I erred on the name of Nimrod’s editor: It is Eilis O’Neal, not Ellis. And, she is a woman, not a man, as I wrote. I regret the error and apologize to Eilis for my sloppiness.