Ashes to Ashes

Anna Sullivan Reiser

Word Count 1351

In October 2015 my family buried half of our mother’s ashes at our home in Woodstock, Vermont, only to exhume them seven years later. 

As she was dying from a rare type of bone cancer that rapidly metastasized and left her body paralyzed, Mom decided to be buried in two places— Curtis Hollow Farm and her family plot in Boston. In some ways, her decision made sense. After all, she’d always split her time between Woodstock and Boston. But, nobody else in our family was buried at Curtis Hollow. Plus, we were most likely going to have to sell the property after she died.

“I want all of us to be buried at Curtis Hollow someday,” Mom said one afternoon during hospice. My two sisters and I were all huddled around her hospital bed, set up in the downstairs bedroom of my parents’ Boston apartment. A long moment of silence followed her request. 

Later that afternoon I pulled my husband, Alex, aside to check in about our eternal resting plan. With a few choice words, he made it very clear he did not want to be buried at my parents’ house. I wasn’t surprised, I could barely get him to spend one week there in the summer. But despite all our growing concerns, Mom’s plan moved forward. In the end, I did what I have always done— I carried out my mother’s wishes.

My sisters and I grew up in a suburb outside of Boston, but we spent every summer with our mother in Vermont. During these months, our father stayed in Boston for work and would drive up on the weekends. Back then, Curtis Hollow was a small farmhouse set on 100 acres of land. I spent my summer days with a flock of sheep my mother kept in the field behind our house. The grass was overgrown but if I looked up I could find my mother’s straw hat bobbing up and down as she worked in her garden. Like a mooring on the water, it guided me home.

The cold and wet day in May we unburied our mother, my older sister, Kristen, and I walked in silence up the steep, dirt path to the gravesite. Curtis Hollow had been sold and we’d spent the past few months packing up our childhood home. The last thing we needed to do was move our mother’s ashes. Kristen was carrying a woven basket heavy with food, a bottle of wine, and a bouquet of flowers. I carried two large shovels. When we reached the top of the hill we paused to catch our breath before crossing the meadow and climbing the stone steps that led to Mom’s grave. We dropped our heavy load to the ground—crackers, marinated artichoke hearts, cheeses, flowers, and a bottle of wine came spilling out from the basket like an offering. My sister and I looked at each other and smiled. We thought the same thing— Mom would have loved that we packed a gourmet picnic for her unburying.

Our mother was the life of every party. She could turn any room into an upbeat social gathering— even in the chemo ward. She had a natural way of diffusing pretense with self-deprecation, making everyone around her feel at ease. She once sent me a postcard from Betty Ford that began, “Dear Annie, I’ve flunked at being a mother.” Another from Hazelden that read, “It’s nice here. Much like a country club without the golf.” Vodka was her vice and she kept bottles of it hidden around the house. When I was younger I thought the expression ‘to air your family’s dirty laundry’ had something to do with finding alcohol in the laundry room closet. 

“You three are like the CIA,” Alex said to me early in our relationship, referring to the level of surveillance my sisters and I performed on our mother. He was right, we were born detectives constantly searching for clues to confirm our hunches. We were learning—from a young age—how to dig for the truth and how to hide it away again.

My mother kept many secrets. For instance—before she got married and had three daughters—she’d been a nun and lived in a convent. While packing Curtis Hollow, I found an unopened box labeled “Sister Susie.” Buried at the bottom of the box, covered in a wildflower print fabric, was her bible. The spine was cracked and there were handwritten letters hidden within its pages. I carefully unfolded one note, written in my mother’s flowery script and titled: Please Read: Job 38. Have you ever heard the stars sing? Have you ever in your life given orders to the morning? Which is the way to the home of light? Where does darkness live? Has the rain a father? Do you know? Neither do I! And because I don’t, things have perspective. Today can be lived and so can tomorrow. I stared at my mother’s familiar handwriting, before carefully refolding the piece of paper and putting it back where I found it.

After Mom died we buried her ashes in her family plot in Boston and had her service at the same chapel in which she worshiped as a child. The priest read Psalm 23: A Psalm of David: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. And I thought of the sheep in our field. I could feel the thick, clumps of fleece in my hand as they guided me through the tall grass. I saw my mother’s straw hat floating at the top, guiding me along.

A few days later we drove the rest of Mom’s ashes to Vermont. Fall foliage had peaked and most of the leaves had already fallen, leaving behind a patchwork quilt of autumn colors on the ground. We buried what was left of Mom in the meadow and later danced on the deck to a six-piece brass band, per her request. It was a clear, crisp evening— the precipice to Winter—and the stars shone in the night sky. That evening they seemed especially close and familiar. The first frost would arrive the next morning, blanketing the field with snow and tucking Mom in for the long winter. Our mother was a part of Curtis Hollow Farm, the home she loved.

“Wear these so you don’t get blisters,” Kristen said, handing me a pair of pink gardening gloves. We stood atop our mother’s grave and together broke through the hard ground to the soft earth below. Eventually, we hit the plastic vessel that was protecting Mom’s urn. I loosened the dirt around the large bin and pried off the top. The urn was resting inside, in pristine condition.

I bent down and carefully took my mother in my arms. I placed her above ground and removed the ceramic top from the urn. For a moment, my sister and I stared down at the plastic bag that held our mother’s ashes. I don’t know what I had expected to find—perhaps something frightening like maggots or worms—but it was just dust. After a moment, I carefully placed the top back on the urn and began working to refill the grave with dirt. We packed the untouched picnic and placed our mother inside the woven basket next to the artisan cheeses and tulips. Later, we would unite these ashes with the rest of her ashes, next to her mother in Boston. 

My sister and I looked up at the pink sky as a hummingbird took flight across the meadow. The sun was setting and the air was turning cooler. It was time for us to get back to our families. We crossed the meadow and stepped back into the woods. The path was familiar, and somehow our load didn’t feel quite as heavy as it had before. We made it to our car just as night was falling. I turned for a moment, to look back at the empty house—it seemed smaller and looked beautiful, softly glowing in the moonlight—before taking my mother home. 

Anna is a therapist and writer. She is an MFA dropout and a member of the Brooklyn Writers Collective. She lives in Santa Fe, NM with her husband and two children.