I bought a brass urn for my dad’s ashes eight years after he died.
It was secondhand and a bargain at 30 bucks. As I went to leave the shop and picked it up off the counter it was heavier than anticipated. There was someone still in there.
The first vessel to contain Dad’s ashes was a standard-issue blue-plastic canister. The day I collected him from the funeral home was another grim step in the machinations that follow loss.
My mate checked in on me that morning. I quipped I should get a miniature weber barbecue to contain his ashes. Dad loved a barbie. When I got home there was a brand new mini weber on top of the dog-kennel at the front door.
And so it was the ashes of John Cunningham spent a year in the living room in a small kettle barbecue. I could have scattered him somewhere nice, but he loved us. He’d had his own key, he was in awe of his grandchildren.
I’d like to say that the disrespect of the barbecue got to me, but it wasn’t that, it was the blip in the décor of the living room; a space cobbled together from hand-me-down furniture, things found on the side of the road, junk shop treasures. The small barbecue was an off-key note in an otherwise harmonious arrangement . It had to go. This is what living in an age of unlimited, free deco-porn has done to me. I “curate” things.
Dad spent the next seven years in a cupboard with a lattice front where he could look out at the day-in-day-out of his family. Meanwhile I was on constant lookout for a container that would hit the right note in my collection of heavily styled tat.
I looked online for proper urns but they were hundreds of dollars. Imagine my delight when I found one at a junk shop. It was plain, un-engraved, unpretentious.
As I picked it up to leave I looked at the woman who had just sold it to me and said “I think there’s someone still in here”. It was awkward for a bit and then my phone rang, the perfect excuse to scarper. A lesser person might’ve had a moment of conscience, indecision or even fear. My son was calling. I had to go.
I launched into telling him about the find. He was speechless for a beat, before exclaiming “Are you trying to get haunted?”
In the coming weeks I tried to come to grips with what it meant that a whole person’s remains had not only been abandoned at a junk shop, but were about to be further dismissed by me. I wondered if Dad wouldn’t mind a roomie, to share the urn. It was more likely the roomie would very much mind John, whose vices were legion.
The situation had become terribly onerous.
There’s a monthly storytelling night in Perth called Barefaced stories. It’s unpolished, raw and brilliant. The brave and tender hearted of Perth are lit up on a small stage, throats a little constricted, voices a little high. Without notes they recount a moment from their lives, adhering loosely to a theme. It’s an extraordinary and transformative thing, the alchemy of it adding up to love.
I’ve wobbled on to that stage a few times, using it as a confessional, the audience as priest. I ask for forgiveness, for laughs, for understanding that we are all ridiculous, flawed, flat out trying.
One night last year I secreted the urn and its inhabitant in my handbag on to the stage. I told the audience that my obsessive focus on décor had overridden any sensible contemplation of what it might mean to evict an unknown occupant from their final resting place.
As I wound the story up I brought the urn out of my handbag and sat it on a stool. I asked the audience to share with me a eulogy for a stranger.
I told them I had thought about scattering her (having decided she was a she) in the ocean but was worried she might hate that. Cold and wet, dark at night, sharks.
I said I’d decided to keep her with me, in my garden under a Lilly Pilly hedge.
This was the eulogy:
Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road.
Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go.
So make the best of this test and don’t ask why.
It’s not a question but a lesson learned in time.
I’m not a Greenday fan but I asked 300 strangers to holler these words with me, the catharsis was good:
It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right. I hope you had the time of your life.
Amber Cunningham is a freelance radio producer
