This Is Us

Store in a Cool, Dry Place

A letter to my son

Dear Paul:

One of your sisters asks, “What happens if I shake his box?”

It is one thing to walk by the table with various keepsakes, notes, and photographs dedicated to the dead brother who came before her. It is quite another to realize the small, brown paper-wrapped box contains his ashes.

Even that term — ashes — works to ameliorate an unpleasant thought, to gloss over the act. His dead body—your perfect little dead body — was placed into an incinerator by someone and set on fire. This someone, who I will never meet.

I will never fully get over that I wasn’t there with you in that final moment, that I wasn’t introduced to the hospital employee with this sacred job. What remained of you was swept into a neat, tiny box and labeled with my name on it. And that is how you live now, that is how you stay, like a jar of turmeric or a glass bottle of probiotics.

We store you in a cool, dry place.

But I don’t know how to translate that to a 5-year-old without scaring her. So we talk about the small chunks we hear when we rattle it, and I say, “those are his bones! I bet he had strong bones like you.”