A Box of Ashes

Apr 16, 2025

The contractors saw and sand and hammer in our basement, an ongoing symphony, while I try to take a Zoom call. It is the sound of progress, some would say. Maile’s mom is renovating parts of the basement in anticipation of moving in with us, something we’re all very excited about, but the reason she’s moving up from Tennessee is that Maile’s dad passed away last summer. He had a larger-than-life personality, a million little catch phrases we still repeat and chuckle about. He was a human being with nearly 80 years spent on this Earth, some good, some hard, some honorable, some regrettable. In other words, like all the rest of us.

His ashes are in a small wooden box in our living room. The box is flanked by two metal sculptures, Hawaiian dancers with their arms raised, and his name is engraved in the front along with the dates of his birth and death.

Ashes. Only six weeks ago the priest put the ashes on our foreheads and said the words, and now we’re here, preparing to celebrate an Easter that doesn’t really feel much like an Easter. An Easter of exhaustion and a house in chaos and sadness, always sadness, just below the surface.

I’m also writing this on tax day which reminds me of my own father. When I was a kid, my dad would take his taxes to the post office on April 15th, every single year. It was a kind of pilgrimage, and I always felt he waited until the last minute on principal, waiting until the last possible moment to send his money to Uncle Sam.

Back in those days, before the internet, everyone had to file their taxes on paper forms and mail them to the IRS. This meant the post offices around the country were rather busy on that particular deadline day, the post office workers confronted with lines that went out through the door.

One year I went with my dad in the car to mail his taxes. I wonder why I went with him that particular time? The post office was open later than usual, extended hours for that special day, and I remember it was getting dark, and we were in a long line of cars waiting to get into the parking lot. I was just a little guy but in those days even little guys sat in the front seat, and I leaned on the open window and the cool spring air rushed in.

People honked their horns at each other in the line and other cars honked as they drove past—it was like a parade, except there everyone was united in the misery of tax day. But, somehow, being together, as human beings often do, they turned a hardship into a party.

But now we’ve made things easier—we click a few buttons on our computers and our taxes whisk through the air and cables and all is submitted and finished. We never even leave our desks, or our dining room tables, or our sofas. It’s just another way that in making things easier we’ve actually made them harder. Instead of enduring the hassle of driving up to a post office in the early evening, waiting in line along with everyone else, united in our misery, we click a button.

Annoyance averted.

Community averted.

But why am I thinking of taxes on this spring day? Outside, the rose bushes are emanating green leaves and the trees’ buds are unfurling and the smell of cut grass makes me feel 40 years younger, reminds me of those days when Dad would tell me to go mow the lawn.

I saw an old friend from elementary school the other night and when another person asked how I knew her, I said we went to school 40 years ago, and then my friend and I looked at each other with something like shock.

40 years.

Maile and I listen to a song my daughter and her boyfriend recorded, Here at the Beehives. The opening of that song features the sound track from a home video, a long-ago recording of my daughter’s boyfriend’s father playing with his three boys. This father passed away some years ago.

Walk down with me to the sea
Before you pack and leave
Waves look different, shoreline shifted
It’s nothing like it used to be

And as we listen to the two of them harmonizing, Maile starts to cry in the bathroom. I know she’s thinking of her dad’s ashes in the living room and this young man’s dad dying too soon and maybe even the Ash Wednesday ashes on our foreheads and the words of the priest. I walk over and wrap her in my arms.

“There’s just so much sadness,” she says. “There’s so much more sadness ahead of us.”

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

What do you do when life feels like one long Lenten season?

My youngest sister had a baby nearly six months ago, and when I hold her she looks deep into my eyes and smiles. She was born a few months after Maile’s dad died. She rolls around now and tries to crawl, often face-planting on whatever is in front of her. She is all softness and light and baby deliciousness.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

My nephew is a parent now, too, which means my sister and brother-in-law are grandparents. We are now the next generation, the one trying to guide our kids off into young adulthood while simultaneously ushering our parents into the last decades of their lives. We watch our children become parents when it feels that they were babies only weeks ago. People we love die and their ashes are in boxes in our houses. How can this be? We can say we’ve known people for 40 years and remember when we met.

How can this be?

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Easter comes around again, perhaps the only true hope left to any of us, and we hide eggs (in our house everyone hunts down a box of sugar cereal), and we laugh with delight at babies toddling through green grass, unsteadily plucking a plastic egg and shaking it, candy rattling inside. We eat chocolate and we say he is risen and we drive home through the oh-so-bright sunlight, the daffodils already full and near to fading, the tulips just opening, the April clouds light as days and days and days.