The Ashes

Like most black people, I am prone to extremely dry skin and hair. When I was younger, one of the most biting insults you could call someone or be called yourself, was "ashy". Much like the tactful and fleeting gesture to the mouth when a friend has something in their teeth or toilet paper stuck to their shoe; one was obligated to discreetly make a friend aware of their signature matte gray degradation. Sometimes, if the skin is so parched that the outer layer died but had not yet been shed, one could drag a nail against the scale and watch a sheet of skin flake off and float to the floor. If you were at the point of noticeably ‘dandruffy legs', you were better off changing your name and switching school districts due to the incessant ridicule.  

On many a cold October morning - after the frost of the morning but before the radiant heat of the midday sun - the time when all of the body's water reserves are used to regulate both the newness of the day and the constantly evolving temperatures throughout it; I recall emptying my cherry flavored "Chapstick" between my hands and rubbing them together furiously, the friction of which would melt the wax smoothly into a lubricating polish and shine my shame.

To call someone "ashy", probably trumped most "yo mama" jokes, as literally EVERYONE has some negative unexpressed emotions toward their own mother and so can laugh internally - even if required to show outward offense for the sake of banter. There was not one single positive aspect to being ashy, and to be caught with a patch of dehydrated epidermis, meant that you were poor, negligent and stupid, all at once. It was the period on the end of the sentence, the argument stopper, the mic dropper, the incontrovertible win.  Being ashy was so serious, it was almost not even funny anymore.  Almost.

Dead dusty dermis and bones were my father's ashes. Seeing my dad's ashes for the first time was akin to that "mic drop" of finality; and no less a shame. They were that exact same gray color as a patch of animated "ash" on a living being, just as dry to the touch and just as serious - which is to say that even they adopted an element of absurdity in their pathologically personified presence in my life. I would be going too far if I said that I saw my father in every neglected patch of skin that I saw, like some transient and resurrected "Shroud of Turin" or temporary tattoo. I simply marvel at how multidimensional and transmutable the term "ashes to ashes; dust to dust" is.  Holding those ashes for the first time in my hands, the universe, its laws, life, death and everything in between made perfect sense and with stark clarity.  To this day I do not know if that download was a gift from God or a grievous loss of innocence.  With the turn my life would take from that moment forward, one would easily assume the later.   

 The ashes were separated into 8 equal portions, one for each of his seven children, and one for the remaining widow, the fragmented ashes were zip-locked in plastic bags and stored in tawdry rose gold colored cardboard boxes that one would find from a gift wrapping kiosk in a mall during the Christmas holidays.  No metal urn or ceramic sarcophagus.  Just cheap craft boxes on clearance; undesirable in June far from the Christmas holiday on each end of its placement on the calendar.  And while I do not advocate for the use of racialized science to prove personal truths, it is proven that African Americans have greater bone density than other races (although it would be a while later that I had a clear comparison for this being “fact”); my dad - being "a big man" - produced a prodigious amount of ashes, belying the fragile skeletal form my father assumed in his last days.

I was fascinated by the ashes and would marvel at their inconsistency.  Dipping my finger in periodically watching the heavy particles fall away before blowing the fine dust into the air and watching it dissipate or licking it suspiciously.  I would thumb through and pickup bigger pieces of bone wondering what part of the body it was and why it did not disintegrate further.  Was it made of harder stuff?  Was the heat unevenly distributed in the furnace leaving these bits less “cooked” down to dust?  I remember finding a nail in my ashes and was furious thinking that they had burned him and the coffin, with this being an offending nail therein.  I thought this way for more time than I would like to admit before I remembered my father’s many surgeries which included getting screws and pins to put his breaking bones back together.  Sheepishly, I maintain that it made absolute sense to me at the time given the weight of the baggie.  

All "done and dusted", my portion of ashes must have been at least 5 pounds sans the tactless box they resided in.  It took me a few months to collect "my" ashes due to the processing time of his remains.  In that time, I tried to pretend that it had not happened since there was nothing tangible to tether it to.  It was as if my hands were itching for proof.  I went back to what I knew of my life prior to his death, working for a wilderness school in Wyoming. When I finally collected the ashes, on my way from North Carolina to Baja, Mexico, a drive which took me all of 4 days to drive the 3,018 miles.

My dad rode shotgun the entire way, as we barreled down Route 1; windows down and radio loud enough to match the howling sound of the wind and the rustle of Dad's bag plastic, like routine roadtrip chatter. Merlin, fast asleep on the backseat, unbothered by his displacement of co-pilot. He instinctively knew his redefined support role in our escapades. Despite the immense pain and heartache I was enduring, it was these moments that became heavily romanticized and the most meaningful. In the solitude and the serenity of healing. #nofilter