“What are we going to do about Grandma?” my sister Sharon asked. I sighed. Grandma had always been a problem, and something had to be done about her, now that my sister Sharon was moving to Tennessee. Away from the cold, coastal rain and into the humid heat. Away from the town where we grew up. Away from family ties. We sat on the floor in the bungalow’s bare-walled living room among the packing boxes, strapping tape and sacks of packing popcorn, wrapping stemware in dishcloths and towels. I was staying but I sure as heck didn’t want Grandma.
“Can we just leave her downstairs?” I asked.
“No, we can’t just leave her downstairs!” my sister said. “We aren’t heartless. What would the new owner do with her?”
“Take one look at the ash and bone flakes and freak? Throw her in the garbage?”
“Exactly. Think again.”
“We could scatter her on the compost bin.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Sharon exploded. “She’s our grandmother, not some garden fertilizer.”
“Well, that’s what I want done with my ashes when I die,” I countered. “It’s not heartless. It’s green and sustainable.”
“Ginger, she cannot stay on the shelf in the basement, and she cannot be tossed in the garbage or on the compost bin. Besides, she hated gardening. Suppose our cousins or our aunts or someone related wants to come visit her finally, to pay their respects?”
Sharon knew that wasn’t going to happen. Mom had passed on before Grandma, so she was out of the equation. Dad wouldn’t let her name be spoken in our presence. He would have dispatched her long before her due date if he could have figured out how to get away with it. No one could stand the thought of her spirit hanging around nagging to be buried somewhere once she was dead and then griping that it wasn’t done right.
I hadn’t wanted Grandma either, so my younger sister, the softie, took her home in the cheap funeral spittoon thingie. Sharon was the one person in the family who’d been the least affected by Grandma’s poison. Despite knowing what the rest of us had suffered, she still felt the tiniest bit responsible. She stashed Grandma on the basement shelf, next to the toilet paper from Costco.
“It’s been ten years and if no one’s come to claim her remains by now…I suppose we could toss her in the ocean,” I said.
“She hated the ocean. Remember that time she visited and we went to the beach and she refused to get out of the car and swore all the way home, bitching about how we wasted her afternoon?”
“Yeah, and how smelling the seaweed made her sick to her stomach.” I smiled to myself just thinking about it. I could do that now she had passed on.
“I don’t have the extra cash to spend money on a cemetery spot or a slot for that old battle ax, nor do I want to,” I said. “Do you? You don’t have any extra either, what with the move.”
“We don’t have to,” Sharon explained. “Here’s my idea. We go to the cemetery when it’s not busy, on Sunday, before the sun rises, and we bury her under that oak so she‘s good and grounded and won’t blow away. I don’t want her following me to Tennessee,” she says. Sharon’s joke makes me feel like she’s on my side again and I laugh.
Oh, my, what a dilemma. We had my mom in a cardboard box on the bookshelf for twelve years until Dad died, then my brother built a cedar wood box for the two of them to be buried together. Before he sealed the box he saved some of their ashes in old metal camera film canisters and gave them to me. I suppose I should do something with them—give them back to my brother?
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