In March of 2020 we lost my mother unexpectedly at 68 years young. In September of 2020, we lost my father unexpectedly at 72 years young. This is my story about saying our final goodbyes.
My parents’ wishes were to be cremated and my siblings and I honored those wishes. I remember picking up the boxes with their ashes. They were surprisingly light. Did you know that you can have ashes separated into separate boxes? We opted for a large box and a small box for each parent as we wanted to scatter them together at two separate sites. I gingerly carried them out to my vehicle, on separate occasions of course, and I safely buckled the ashes into my SUV.
In April 2021 we scatter the large box of Mom and smaller box of Dad at Camp Tuckaho Girl Scout Camp at the lake. My mother, and avid Girl Scout volunteer, would be at her final happy, resting place. We had a bench made with a plaque dedicated in their honor overlooking the lake. It was a nice touch. It was a chilly day. We had our families with us. It was OK. Sure, we were misty-eyed but we made it through.
Later that April, my siblings and I headed to Devil’s Back, a river area in Missouri, to scatter the large box of Dad and the smaller box of Mom. My father would be at his final happy place. It was a good two hour drive to get to the location in the middle of nowhere. As we drove, we could see the river but it looked like we could cross it. I came up to it and hit the brakes FAST as my brother yelled, “Don’t go in it!” Like the Oregon Trail, we could NOT have forged the river. It was moving way too fast and heaven only knows how deep it was. I hit it in reverse in the deep mud. Then we got stuck.
The SUV that is supposed to handle any terrain slowly slid off into a ditch. We were almost on our side. I tried to get out of it. Turned the wheel one way, turned it another way. It wasn’t happening. I began to get really stressed out so I climbed out of the passenger side and let my brother climb in the near sideways vehicle. He tried and tried. We were quite literally stuck in the mud. We would need a tow truck to pull us out of this.
My sister was already on her phone trying to reach her husband. Ah, what luck! No signal. Nope, not mine either. Nope, not on Tom’s either. Great. Tom had the phone number of the farmer who owned the land where we were going to scatter the ashes and hoped we’d be able to get ahold of him. He walked up the hill in a sketchy area to see where he could get a signal. My sister and I hung back by the vehicle. We were being watched. We could feel it. There was an abandoned house, windows broken out. It looked condemned. Should we go to the door for help? Stephanie and I quickly decided against that.
At this point, I’m nearly in tears from the stress of it all. The only way people could find us was with a GPS pin-we couldn’t give directions. Looking up the hill, there was Tom walking back! He brought good news! The farmer was on his way out but happened to grab the phone and he would be on his way with his tractor to rescue us shortly.
“What do we do?”
“Well, I guess we could go ahead and scatter the ashes.”
“Yeah, let’s knock that out.”
We walked up to the river ensuring we were not too close, our shoes sticking in the mud. We knew Dad wanted to be IN the water and we wanted to honor those wishes. It was a windier day than our previous encounter. There was a blow back. We saw small bone fragments. This was not the same experience!
Softly in the distance we heard the puttering of the tractor on its way. We muck through the mud back to the vehicle. After some brief introductions, my vehicle was chained to the back of a tractor and pulled out from its muddy slumber. It was challenging and it took a bit to dislodge it but it did work. Thankfully it was driveable immediately. Tires were fine and the alignment seemed OK.
We began to scrounge up what cash we had and paid the farmer for helping us out and thanked him 100 times over. We got back in the car and made our way back home. I was white knuckled and silent the entire drive. I was definitely coming down from fight-or-flight mode and beginning to tire. It was a long afternoon, to say the least, but the job was done. We had laid them to rest.
Later that spring, I took my vehicle to the dealer for a routine oil change and tire rotation.
“Ma’am, do you take your vehicle off-roading?”
“Do I look like I would take my vehicle off-roading? I’m a suburban Mom.”’
“Well, you’ve got a ton of mud on the undercarriage and your alignment needs to be fixed. Off-roading voids your warranty ”
“Oh, I have no idea how that could have happened. Maybe a puddle and a curb?”
So there’s my story of scattering our parents’ remains. We can laugh about it now, the experience of it all, but it sure as heck wasn’t funny at the time. May you have a better experience than I!
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