Happy Belated Father’s Day

The weekend I spent packing as I prepared to leave my first husband was like bringing ice breaker questions to life. “What three things would you take to a desert island?” “If your house was burning down, what would you carry with you on the way out?”

I had not told my husband I was leaving him for good. I was going out of town for work on Monday, but this time I was not planning to come back. Although things had clearly been on the rocks, my husband had often said I would never have the wherewithal to leave him. Meeting and falling in love with Basil had made me realize how deeply unhappy I had been in my marriage and the possibilities that lay beyond it.

I was not sure what the aftermath would be when my husband figured out I had left for good, but I was preparing for the worst: having whatever possessions of mine remained in the house thrown out on the lawn, thrown in the trash, lit on fire, etc. But I was also trying to balance whatever I packed with having enough room in my car to carry around co-worker’s suitcases, as I was driving two fellow employees to Northeast Ohio for the week. Thus, I had to be selective.

This is how my father’s ashes came to reside in a gallon freezer Ziplock baggie. If I took the urn with me, which sat displayed on a bookcase in the living room, my ex-husband to be would likely have realized something was up. Looking back on it now, it seems so ridiculous to go through such a production simply to delay one of life’s most unpleasant conversations by all of five days, but at the time I could think of no other way to proceed.

“Sorry Dad,” I said as I poured his remains into the baggie, “this is just temporary.”

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I did not feel bad leaving the urn behind because my father had never wanted an urn like that: it was silver, tarnished, and Victorian-looking. My mother had sent it to me about four months prior after she had weaseled my mailing address out of some relative on my father’s side of the family. It had come in a box, along with a few photo albums and a Christmas card, the inscription of which said nothing to indicate we had stopped speaking eight years prior.

I had been surprised to see the ashes, as I hadn’t known there were any left. Within the first year of my father’s death, my mother had taken them with her on a trip to Buffalo to spread in various places. My father, to my knowledge, had never asked to have his ashes spread in Buffalo. I recall someone showing me pictures of her spreading them in places around Buffalo I didn’t recognize. The photos made it look like she was sprinkling spices into invisible soup pots.

Although my mother and I were still speaking at the time of the Buffalo ash-spreading, I couldn’t bring myself to ask her if she had spread them all or if she had saved any for me or Max. I didn’t even know if Max wanted any.

When I thought about broaching this topic of conversation, a voice from within me asked, “What does it matter? Those ashes aren’t Dad. Dad is somewhere else now.” At the time, it seemed to me like scooping up ashes from your house after it burned down: holding them close to you wasn’t going to put a roof over your head.

This voice was also in direct contradiction with what I knew my father’s wishes to be: that I not only have his ashes, but carry them with me always.

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Walking out of the movies during a summer day in Phoenix always made stark the division between the fictitious world of film and the reality of the world outside the theater: the sunlight would induce a squint as I walked into a wall of hot desert air, making the cool darkness of the theater seem miles away.

“What did you think Dad?”

It was 1999. We had just come from seeing Mystery Men. While my father could appreciate movies hailed as cinema classics (Casablanca was always on his top 10 list), he was also broad in his definition of what a “good movie” was. He thought Mystery Men was funny: it was filled with some terrible puns, which Siegels are genetically predisposed to liking. He was also thrilled that Tom Waits had a relatively prominent role in the film, and enjoyed the untraditional super hero ideas the film bandied about.

At some point in our post film discussion, we talked about how The Bowler, Janeane Garofalo’s character, had enshrined her father’s skull in a bowling ball. The Bowler used this bowling ball to fight crime in the film, and the film suggests her father’s spirit could move the ball and “help” Bowler fight crime when necessary.

My father then said he wanted me to memorialize him with a similar arrangement when he died.

“You want me to enshrine your skull in a bowling ball? I don’t even bowl.” I hated to give him such a negative answer, but it was a request I hadn’t been anticipating.

My father thought about it. He then told me I was right, not his actual skull in a bowling ball, because he wanted to be cremated. My father was perfectly healthy at the time, as far as we knew, and yet he seemed very resolved about being cremated.

“How do you know you want to be cremated?” I asked.

“We don’t know what happens when we die. And on the off-chance we are chained to our physical bodies after we croak, I don’t want to be buried underground and stuck there forever.”

I was taken aback by the terrible thought of my father, buried underground for all of eternity, his ghost caught in the wrong realm. With this in mind, I could see why choosing cremation had a certain appeal.

This conversation reminded me of when my dad would hand me a novel or a short story of his to read and I would come across a section of the work where a character would have some bleak, depressing thoughts. I would immediately feel sad: if my father had written that down, it meant at one time he had (or imagined having) similar bleak, depressing thoughts. I would childishly wish I could protect him from such sadness or depression, simultaneously knowing that I could not.

“Okay, you want to be cremated and I don’t bowl. So how does the skull come into it?”

“You could get a necklace with a skull at the end of it. You could put some of my ashes in the skull and wear it.”

I could feel my eyebrows raising high, “You want me to wear your ashes around my neck?” I was not opposed to a kick-ass skull necklace, but the whole thing was so macabre.

“Is that so much to ask?”

We had been driving home and just pulled into the driveway of my parent’s house. As my dad put the car in park, he turned to look at me. I realized he was serious.

“Okay. I will put your ashes in a skull necklace and wear them. If that’s what you want.”

I was 18 years old the day we had this conversation. My father was fifty. I thought about the decades before us, thinking there was plenty of time for him to change his mind about the skull necklace idea.

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Dad died suddenly three years later, having done next to no end of life planning. Given this was one of the few wishes about his death that I actually knew for certain and given how much I loved my father, one would think I would have been driven to honor this wish. But I was swept away in the chaos that followed his passing. I also worried the minute I expressed an interest in having my father’s ashes, my mother, having become aware they were something I wanted, would either ransom them or simply throw them out. This in turn made me angry with my father for not doing more to protect my brother and I from my mother. I would then proceed to do nothing more about it.

A few years ago, Basil asked me if I had ever considered getting a bottle of Crystal Head Vodka and using it as an urn for my father’s ashes. He suggested I could paint it. I immediately thought of the Oaxacan sugar skull art my father had loved and agreed it was a great idea. We always make a pilgrimage to my dad’s favorite liquor store, Premier Wine and Spirits, when we go to Buffalo. They would likely have Crystal Head at a good price, and there seemed no place more fitting to purchase my father’s actual urn.

But the next several times we went to Premier after that discussion, I made excuses not to buy the bottle. It was so expensive–maybe it would be cheaper next time. Basil continued to research and confirmed it would be nearly just as expensive to buy an empty Crystal Head vodka bottle off of Etsy or a similar website. Although neither Basil nor I are vodka enthusiasts, it was supposed to be good quality vodka, and I couldn’t imagine my father passing on an opportunity to drink quality spirits that were dispensed from a skull shaped container. Dad would certainly want us to buy a full bottle from Premier.

When we were in Buffalo this May and headed to Premier, Basil reminded me again. I started to make another excuse: what if the way I painted the skull turned out ugly? He then gently reminded me my father’s ashes had been sitting in a gallon plastic bag for going on two and a half years. I sighed, knowing he was right. I bought the bottle of Crystal Head less than an hour later. After I brought the bottle home, Basil carefully brought the subject up a few more times, which helped me plan how I was going to paint the bottle. Once Basil knew about the colors I wanted, he went out and bought special acrylic paints and a new set of brushes for me to use. Last weekend, on Father’s Day, I started painting the bottle.

As of November 2018, Dad will have been dead for 15 years. Despite the passage of all this time, it took me until Basil’s prompting in May to realize I had been dragging my feet about setting up Dad’s real urn. I didn’t think it was possible I was still unwilling to face some aspects of Dad’s death or that there was an aspect of his death I hadn’t already faced, but making the urn taught me otherwise.

Basil and I watched Mystery Men together a few months ago. I hadn’t seen it in years, since it had been released to video in the early 2000s. I watched the scenes where The Bowler talks to her dad’s skull in the bowling ball, scenes where the skull bowling ball protects her from the evil super villains. I had forgotten that (spoiler alert) the skull bowling ball “sacrifices” itself to help save the super team at the end of the movie.

And I finally realized what my father wanted when he made his unique request to have me keep his ashes in a skull close by: no matter what happened to him when he died, he hoped he would have the chance to still be around and protect me.