In the last Open to Hope posting, “Sacred Moments with the Body after the Death,” Becky Bohan described the home-visitation after her sister-in-law’s death from breast cancer. For four hours, family members and friends bid a final goodbye to Diane, grieved, and supported each other in a sacred ritual. In this installment, Becky’s spouse Nancy recounts the family’s humorous journey to the crematorium and their unusual experience there.

Promptly at 4:30, a hearse pulled up into the driveway. I shuddered as Hank Kolbinger mounted the stairs to Bill and Diane’s bedroom, where twenty of us still surrounded Diane’s body. The tall, thin, bald mortician greeted us with kindness, and I could feel my aversion to this stranger melt away.  I remembered that Bill and Diane had chosen him after interviewing local morticians. Hank, who also had terminal cancer himself and would die within two years, completely supported their unusual wishes for Diane’s after-death care.

After Hank explained the procedure for removing Diane’s body, Bill slipped off her remaining jewelry. Hank spread out a white sheet next to Diane, and he and Bill lifted her onto it. He tucked the sheet around her so she was tightly wrapped. Only the very top of her head, her lustrous silver hair, was visible.

Diane’s daughter-in-law Kate couldn’t bear the silence. She opened a drawer marked “Classical,” pulled out a compact disc at random, and put it on. The music was powerful and stirring. Later, she realized that it was Mozart’s Requiem, a mass for the dead, composed as Mozart lay on his own deathbed.

To the strains of this poignant lament, Bill and Diane’s sons — Mike, Dave, Tim, and Topher — lifted Diane’s shrouded body from the bed and carried it out to the hall.

Their feet spoke of their distinct paths: Mike, a landscape designer, wore work boots. Dave, an environmental studies teacher, was barefooted. Tim, an osteopathic physician, had on Tevas. The youngest son Topher, a carpenter, wore clogs. The four brothers worked together as if they had carried a body before, smoothly turning the corner, gracefully stepping down the wide carpeted stairs, carefully passing through the front doorway, and gently placing their mother on the waiting gurney.

The boys wheeled Diane’s body down the cement walkway to the hearse in the driveway. Her dearest friends, Laura, Bev, Mary, and Sue lined the walk, like an honor guard. Thirty other friends, family members, and neighbors, joined the column to see Diane off. One-year-old Owen Manahan, Tim and Kate’s son, solemnly waved “bye-bye” as his grandmother passed by him, a gesture he had just learned.

As had been decided beforehand, Diane would not be left alone. Bill, Tim, and Kate stayed home to look after houseguests and others who had come for the visitation and to start making arrangements for the wake and Life Celebration. I offered to go to the crematorium with David, his wife Jill, Topher, and his wife Katy.

After accompanying Diane through the final three hours of her life, washing her body, and being present for the four-hour visitation, I wanted to be with her for the rest of the journey. After saying good-bye to Becky, who was returning to Minneapolis, I joined David in the hearse for the ride to the funeral home. Topher, Katy, and Jill followed in Bill’s car.

At the mortuary, Hank and an assistant transferred Diane’s body to a reinforced cardboard box. Before Hank put on the lid, I bent to kiss her forehead.

“Don’t touch the body!” he cried.

“Why not?” I said, taken aback.

“Well,” he said, “there’s bacteria. We’re dealing with a body here. You should all wash your hands thoroughly. The bathroom’s right over there.”

I was speechless. This was Diane, whose body we had bathed, whose hands people had been holding all afternoon. She wasn’t just “a body.” I almost didn’t go to the bathroom out of principle, but I wanted to use it before the two-hour trip to the crematorium. Those moments alone gave me the opportunity to let go of my anger and realize that Hank was simply being a conscientious mortician.

By the time I emerged from the bathroom, the box was in the hearse. I resumed my place beside the mortuary’s hired driver. Dave sat behind us. The coffin was in a separate compartment in back. Jill, Topher, and Katy again followed in Bill’s car. Our little caravan left Mankato, heading northwest one hundred miles to Echo, Minnesota, and the crematorium Hank’s mortuary used.

The driver tried to strike up a conversation.

“So, how’re we doin’ today?” he smiled.

“We’re okay,” Dave and I murmured.

“So then, did you know the deceased?”

David spoke from the back seat. “Actually, she’s my mother.”

“Oh!  So how did she die, was it sudden-like, or had she been ill for a long time?”

“She died of breast cancer six hours ago,” I replied.

“Well, I’m sure sorry to hear that,” he said. “So what did she do?”

“Actually, we’re still grieving,” I said. “We’re not much in the mood for chatting.”

“Oh, well, I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just that I’m not used to anyone riding with me.  In fact this is the first time I’ve ever had anyone come along — well, except for the deceased, of course, heh, heh.”

We thanked him for understanding.  True to his word, the driver didn’t question us again. Eventually Dave and I softly conversed.

After two hours, we arrived at a square metal building, one of the few crematoria in Southern Minnesota at that time. A field of corn shimmered nearby in the dying July light.

The owner of the Echo Funeral Home and crematorium, mortician Tim Kurlow, met us at the door. He looked healthy, relaxed, and comfortable in his gray slacks and short-sleeved deep blue shirt. The driver wheeled in the coffin and left for his solitary return trip to Mankato.

Mr. Kurlow was professional but cheerful, matter-of-fact but compassionate. He welcomed us warmly and explained the cremation process with a reassuring mixture of technical and layperson’s language. We were standing in a spacious, clean room in front of a large free-standing furnace, which he called a cremation chamber. I studied the knobs, dials and temperature gauges. Mr. Kurlow said that it would take two hours for a body the size of Diane’s to burn. The furnace needed to reach sixteen hundred degrees, consume the body, and cool down for another couple of hours. Then the ashes — he called them cremains — would be removed from the chamber.

When the mortician invited our questions, I asked how common it was for a family to accompany the body. Mr. Kurlow said that in his eleven years of running the crematorium, we were the only white family to do so. Laotian and Hmong families had come with their loved ones, he explained. They and the Buddhist monks placed reeds and flowers on the coffin before it went into the crematory chamber. Because Buddhists believe that smoke carries the spirit to heaven, the families would wait to see the smoke rising from the chimney.

Since state law requires a hundred percent burn of a body with no fumes, Mr. Kurlow would allow smoke from the burning reeds and flowers to escape. As soon as the Buddhist children who were gathered outside the crematorium saw smoke rising from the chimney, they threw coins from baskets into the air so the spirit would have money for the journey.

When Dave asked to have the box opened so we could say our final good-bye, Mr. Kurlow didn’t hesitate before lifting the cover. Diane looked peaceful. In fact, a little smile had raised the corners of her mouth during the trip across the prairie. We gazed at her face for the last time, and I kissed her forehead. After the cover was replaced, we all guided the box as it slid on rollers into the cold cremation chamber.

Mr. Kurlow shut the door securely. We took a collective breath , and then he pushed the button. With a roar, the furnace came to life.

“Do you want to see the skeletal remains before I remove them from the chamber?” he asked. “Often the skeleton is relatively intact as the larger bones don’t burn completely.”

We looked at each other, aghast. We hadn’t anticipated that option. Did we really want to see Diane’s skeleton?

Gradually, we overcame our initial discomfort, and one by one, nodded our heads. We had accompanied Diane this far. Why shrink from witnessing her transformation all the way?

“Yes, we’d like that. Thank you for offering,”

“In that case, you can return at ten-thirty, when the cremains should be cool enough to be removed from the chamber,” Mr. Kurlow said. “I’m sorry there’s not much to do in town, but The Recovery Room down on Main Street is probably open if you’d like a bite to eat.”

The five of us stood outside the door of the crematorium. It was a balmy summer evening with a breeze. We walked the few blocks to Main Street, where the stores were locked, but the aptly-named Recovery Room restaurant was open. A few locals were at the bar watching a ballgame.

After we had ordered food, I excused myself and walked outside. I needed a few minutes alone to absorb what had happened. I had started out the day expecting to visit Diane, meet Becky, have lunch with our mothers, and be back in Minneapolis by now. I had ended up almost 200 miles away from home in a little prairie town I’d never heard of as Diane’s body was consumed by flames.

I reached the city park and walked toward a row of trees. I looked back to see if any smoke was rising from the crematorium, but I couldn’t see the chimney in the dark. The huge oaks and cottonwoods were solidly rooted in the ground, yet their branches swayed and their leaves rustled in the night breeze. I prayed for some of their quiet strength and graceful flexibility for myself, for Diane’s family, and for her friends, colleagues and students. I prayed for everyone in the world who was dying that night and for their loved ones.

I whispered, “And we drop like the fruits of the tree. Even we. Even so.” I remembered sharing those final lines from George Meredith’s poem “Dirge in Woods” a few months earlier while Diane and I were walking in Mankato’s Sibley Park. She asked to hear them again and chuckled at Meredith’s rueful humor, reminding us that we are not the center of the universe and that we have about as much control over our dropping as does a peach. But also, like the peach, we are part of the ongoing cycle of life.

Comforted and calmed, I walked back to The Recovery Room, where our family had just been served. Rarely has a juicy hamburger tasted so wonderful. The pitcher of icy beer helped revive us, too.

Later we wandered through town, eventually coming to an open church. We sat in the dark pews, resting. Dave and Topher spotted a door to the basement, where they discovered a ping-pong table.  They called up for the rest of us to come downstairs.

We turned on the lights and discussed whether it would be appropriate to play ping-pong while their mother was being cremated just down the street.  Shouldn’t we be reverent, sorrowful, grown-up?  We sensed that Diane, a child at heart, would be delighted we had found a way to have fun on this of all nights.  So we picked up the ping-pong paddles and began a rousing game, laughing and teasing each other. What better tribute to a woman who had managed to be playful while doing just about everything!

At ten-thirty, we returned to the crematorium. The oven had cooled down, and Mr. Kurlow was opening the door. We peered in and saw, amidst the jumble of ashes, Diane’s bones. The mortician pointed out her thigh and upper arms, as well as her pelvis and skull. Seeing Diane’s bare bones felt eerie and miraculous, impossible and inevitable, like a dream.

But it wasn’t a dream. Mr. Kurlow matter-of-factly fetched a long-handled steel broom, donned heavy gloves, and swept the bones and ashes down a chute at the front of the chamber into a metal pan. He carried the pan over to the adjacent work area, where he stirred the ashes with a giant U-shaped magnet. Dozens of staples from the cardboard box clumped on to both ends of the magnet, and the metal arch supports from Diane’s high-heeled shoes dangled from one side. Mr. Kurlow discarded the steel items and reached in for Diane’s titanium hip joint.

Then he poured the cremains into a large, industrial-strength blender, flipped the switch, and waited while the bones and teeth were pulverized and mixed with the ashes. After allowing the dust to settle, he removed the cover and poured the resulting gray grit into a heavy plastic bag, secured the bag, and took it to the redwood box Topher had made. I could see Topher holding his breath. The bag was larger than we had anticipated. Mr. Kurlow pressed it down into the corners. It fit perfectly.

With the box in hand, along with the artificial hip and documentation from the mortuary, we drove back to Mankato, arriving at one a.m. Bill was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for us. He was exhausted from the long, intense day, communicating with dozens of friends and family members, and taking care of practical matters. Still, he looked calm and at peace.

We placed the box of ashes and Diane’s artificial hip on the table in front of him. He opened the box, took out the bag of ashes, and held it quietly in both hands. After several moments, still holding Diane’s ashes, he asked about the trip and listened intently as the five of us shared our experiences. He hooted when we told him about playing ping pong while Diane was being cremated. He agreed, she would have been delighted.

I was too tired to drive back to my niece’s house for the night, but all the beds were full, so I slept on Bill and Di’s porch, just off the kitchen. Bill gave me a toothbrush and the flannel rosebud pajamas Diane had worn earlier that day. He had washed and dried them while we were at the crematorium. I put on Diane’s pjs and went to bed on the porch sofa.

Even though the journey had been long and exhausting, I was glad I had gone. By accompanying Diane’s body to the crematorium and bringing her ashes back home, I had shifted to a new stage of grieving. David and Topher told me later that it was during the drive to and from Echo that they were able to let go of their mother. Katy and Jill said that the trip completed the whole cycle of Diane’s death for them and made it seem more natural.

As I drifted off to sleep, Diane’s soft flannel pajamas both eerily and comfortingly familiar against my skin, I knew what they meant.

Like the fruit of the tree.

Even we.

Even so.

The next installment from Living Consciously, Dying Gracefully: A Journey with Cancer and Beyond describes the moving wake Bill Manahan held for his wife two days after her death. For more information, or to order the book, visit nanbec.com or amazon.com.

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