How ‘final’ is a final resting place?

Relocating ashes has emerged as a trend. Is this what my parents would want too?

“I just called Mount Pleasant Cemetery. I said, ‘I have the oddest question. Can I possibly retrieve some of my parents’ ashes?’ ” It’s T on the phone, a fellow three-quarter lifer. Our calls start right in, even when the subject is human remains.

T’s parents are interred together in their 12”X12” niche in midtown Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Neither of them wanted any kind of funeral, so they were laid to rest quietly — her mother during the height of COVID in 2021, her father 10 years earlier — in the spot they’d reserved decades earlier. But when her sister planned a trip to Venice last month, T got the middle-of-the-night idea to scatter a small part of their parents in a city where they had all once lived as a family. It felt meaningful. She was on the blower with Mount Pleasant the next day.

“It’s not an odd question at all,” replied Mount Pleasant’s cemetery adviser to T’s question. “We deal with this all the time.”

Garden-variety scattering is hardly a matter of controversy where I live. In my set alone, our parents have been shot by fireworks into the North Atlantic Sea; divided between two predeceased husbands; and shipped to separate provinces, one in Manitoba and the other in

Alberta, taking “until death do us part” literally. There are places with scattering regulations: Germany has banned it and Denmark forbids keeping ashes at home. But here in Toronto, anything goes: “Permission is not required to scatter funeral ashes in Toronto Parks or into water,” explains the helpful City of Toronto website. Which is handy for the 77 per cent of Canadians who, according to a 2021 survey by Statista, will be choosing cremation (cheaper, more versatile, less pressure to make hasty decisions) over burial.

What is new in the ash dispersal world is reconsidering how to scatter the remains of your loved ones after they are interred.

“There’s never been a need to rush a decision about ashes.” Now I’m on the phone with Linda Lee, funeral operations manager, and Antonietta Sweeney, manager, family services, both from Mount Pleasant’s York branch. But COVID put a longer than usual pause on those decisions. “Many people had to hold off,” said Sweeney. “It gave them a chance to really consider what they really want to do.”

As I watched friends forgo or postpone comforting death rituals during the long and unsettling days of the pandemic, I was grateful that my family had been able to gather in 2016 to bury our parents, placing their urns side-by-side under a Rose of Sharon tree at a St. Catharines cemetery, as they requested. But I love a shiny new idea. Listening to T’s Venice plan to relocate some of her parents’ made me reconsider my own parents’ eternal home.

As Catholics, Mom and Dad abided by the Vatican’s rules against scattering by air, land, sea, “or in some other way.” This included being made into jewelry. (For $2999.00 Mount Pleasant will ship ashes to a lab in Switzerland, where they’re turned into diamonds, so you can have your parents in each ear, just as they were in life. Lose an earring and you’ll never hear the end of it.) The Vatican believes that scattering hinders the resurrection of the body into heaven. I’m no longer Catholic, but like most of the lapsed, I play the odds. I plan to keep my remains intact in case resurrecting from multiple locations bumps me down the line on Judgment Day.

I don’t want to scatter Mom and Dad either. What I regret is that they’re in metal urns — the biodegradable options of bamboo, peat and paper weren’t yet popular when they died — so they’ll never go back to the earth or become spring blossoms on their Rose of Sharon tree. But there was no point in going down that road: my parents are buried, not interred above ground like T’s, so retrieving their ashes was not an option.

Or so I thought.

“No, we can do that too,” said Lee. The cost of full disinterment is higher — $3,000 to dig up a grave versus $500 for an above ground niche. But to have people disinterred or even removed from their niche is “not a small thing. We prefer that people understand all the options before they are interred, not after.” Options such as holding some ashes back in case new ideas strike.

There’s a downside to deferring decisions for too long, however — one of those broad lessons for living that you learn in mourning. “COVID gave people a lot of time to think,” said Lee. But “you can have too much time, and then people are, well” — here there is a pause and when Lee speaks again her voice is sad — “some people are forgotten about.” The families never came back for them and “their remains are left at the cemetery.”

None of us says anything for a moment. It’s hard to think about ashes being left behind. It feels unfinished, for the living and the dead. “It can happen when ashes are taken home too. People forget about them. Just don’t wait too long.”

Ten days after her own request, T drove away from Mount Pleasant with a blue velvet bag of her parents’ commingled ashes in the passenger seat beside her. “It was a wonderful feeling being reunited with them.” She didn’t think she was the kind of person who might become attached to ashes. I didn’t think I was that kind of person either. But why should we harden ourselves against the humanness of the dead, against a living and evolving relationship with the people we love? Our family and friends stay with us long after they’re gone. Sometimes the relationship is as strong as it’s ever been.

The closer I get to my own end, the more I think that the care we take around death — the desire to give our loved ones an afterlife in harmony with their lives as they, and we, saw them — is as important as the way we welcome birth. “The light pouring in and the light going out,” is Ann Patchett’s description of birth and death in These Precious Days. We make sure new life has everything it needs to thrive. It makes sense that we should be as thoughtful about final resting places.

At dinner a few days ago, T showed me a video of her parents being scattered in one of the canals of Venice. It looked like a beautiful fall day, and some lovely words were said.

“They really have been laid to rest,” said T.

I thought again about my parents’ urns staying intact underground for generations, like uranium sealed tight against emanations.

“I think it sounds safe,” said T when I told her my qualms about those urns.

“Safe,” I repeated after her. My mother was a homebody, and my father was happy wherever my mother was. Neither of them was big on recycling either — too messy. My parents liked leaving well enough alone. I think they’d like safe.

The closer I get to my own end, the more I think that the care we take around death — the desire to give our loved ones an afterlife in harmony with their lives as they, and we, saw them — is as important as the way we welcome birth