Deathwish 005: Erin
“It is the last place I want to be for the rest of eternity”
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My father died unexpectedly a week shy of my eighteenth birthday. He was found on his weight bench with the bar across his chest, and the official story is that his exact cause of death was not determined because the City of Boston cremated him without performing the autopsy and toxicology my family requested. It’s not all that important, but it is one more unanswered question, one more way I will never get closure.
My dad wanted to have his ashes scattered atop Seneca Rocks in his home state of West Virginia. So the mourners -- my brother and I, along with our mother (who had been divorced and estranged from my father for four years), and my father’s family (some of whom hated my mother and not-so-secretly blamed her for his death) hiked to the top of Seneca Rocks with my father’s urn in tow.
I carried the urn the whole way to the top in a backpack I’d borrowed from my cousin. The urn was made out of ceramic, I think, and it was black with an austere silver design etched into it. The thing probably weighed about 20 pounds, but in my memory it was so much heavier. I sweated and strained the whole way up the hill. The backpack straps dug into my shoulders, and my uncle and my dad’s best friend offered to carry the load for a while, but I was resolved. It was my burden to carry.
There’s a lot I could tell you about that day: the ashes that stayed under my fingernails and blew back in my face; the golden eagles that flew overhead; how the sunset was the most vibrant sunset I have ever seen, before or since. But now, the years of meaning I’ve given it, it all feels so heavy.
I am thirty now, and in so many ways, my father’s death has defined my life. Up until this very moment I have thought I would also have my ashes scattered on Seneca Rocks when I died. It’s only now that I realize I’ve spent enough time up on that hill. It is the last place I want to be for the rest of eternity. I don’t have to carry that urn anymore.
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Erin was born in Charleston, WV, and lives in Portland, OR now.