Ian yesterday all warm in the new pod now placed by one of my workroom windows
Dear friends and readers,
The last couple of days I’ve come really to acknowledge, to see and to feel the presence of the urn in which Jim’s ashes are now on the mantelpiece.
For over a year I had not gotten myself to pay attention to it. Not that I tried. I just knew I was not. It was not my choice to burn up his corpse; asked and given time, I probably would have buried his corpse to hold onto to as much of him, whatever there was left, as I could. But he was so determined on this, had picked out the sort of urn he wanted if we could find a version (of the urn one of the characters carries around in Handel’s Julio Caesare), wrote a set of verses for it, and said “put it on the mantelpiece.” Both daughters wanted to do what he wanted, and Caroline kept pointing out how much more money land, coffin, and burial would have been, and then we decided well before he died so I would have to return to the funeral home and upset the arrangements.
So I went with it. Did what the others wanted as the easiest thing to do in the hard circumstances. What did it matter once he was dead? I didn’t want him to die, and if I couldn’t stop him being dead, then all was that junkyard in comparison that didn’t matter.
I did whisper to Yvette I feared I’d find it creepy. I feared it would upset me, be a haunted thing there. But in the event, not so. I’m too thoroughly an atheist to see the urn as anything other than expensive pottery carved and beautifully dyed, with the left over dust of a corpse burnt through the cremation process. I set beside it a photo of him in fall 2012 when probably he had begun to be more ill than we realized (he had various conditions of old age from his mid-50s on), and a stuffed sheep we four had bought from a happy time all four together had gone to Stonehenge in the summer of 2004. It looked like a shrine, sort of. But it was not, or not in my mind. (It still isn’t. I’m not the type to perceive benign magic.)
A photo I took about half an hour ago using my cell phone
You see about two days ago when this incessant cold rain began, dank and chilling, and the sky look so grey it came to me, I was glad that his corpse, his body, what was left of it when it seemed to my eyes to turn ston-y, was not out there in the raw cold ground. I felt I would not like to think of him cold in the ground even if his consciousness was gone. Rotting from time. I didn’t want to see his corpse just before the cremation; I could have but feared such a memory would destroy me. Now the last I saw of his remains (another word for this condition of deadness) was dressed in his jeans, a t-shirt, socks, moccasins, his hair even brushed slightly as the hospice people dressed him (with my help) before winding the corpse in two large sheet and hefting and carrying his remains out.
They did that dressing for my sake. Oh what a moment there was. My life went out with him. The agony of that I feel every time I re-imagine the scene. The last time to be with him. And then the house without him.
Well not quite. Now what is left is there, I am aware of it in the house; I can’t let myself sit and cry in front of it but my awareness makes me cry. I can cry in my room. I had planned to scatter the ashes, as I read his inscription as suggesting he wanted the ashes to be scattered eventually.
Alluding to Rupert Brooke
But there is a problem. There are only two appropriate places: somewhere off the coast of England, to which I’d have to carry said urn; Yvette said she would come, and I have a good friend in England who lives in Torquay, and she said she’d accompany us to a good place for us to do this act there, but now Caroline wants to with us, and that means a long journey together (plane, train) back and forth, beyond staying in England together.
Equally good is by the Hudson River where for so many years past 200th Street he and I (for 8 years with a dog, Llyr) would walk together. He loved New York City and regarded it almost as much his home or place as England. That February before the diagnosis (2013) he was still trying for an apartment in Manhattan: he found a 2 bedroom one not far from the Spanish museum on upper Broadway, nice block, gentrified as they say, and we said maybe. Maybe as soon as Yvette got a permanent job we would do this — sell the house, and the money we got for it would probably be enough for an apartment. But we were not sure as our home here is so large and comfortable, and we did have a rich cultural life here too — not NYC’s one, and so we did not reject the plan, the dream of return.
Even so it’s a train ride, then a hotel, then walk there and do it, the three of us together. Read aloud one of the poems or passages he liked to recite and then go for a meal.
Now I’m understanding why Yvette does not want to scatter them at all. She finds comfort in their presence. I can’t go that far but I am glad he’s not out in that bleak winter world — like some homeless person. He has a home so deep in my heart while I live I keep alive parts of him.
Clary cat just up from curled sleep in the other new pod I’ve bought for my room: it’s on a chair near mine so when she turns round she sees me and I see her
I was going to end this with a poem for Christmas, or the Solstice or whatever you want to call this season. As is common with me though I find I don’t like most of them: many are religious; others are too built up (as if compensating for not being invested with some special set of images numinous with history and memory); others too personal and then again why be bitter? But as my companions are now my beloved cat-friends, I am cheered to say my friend whose cat is aging (19 years old now), has finally completed his poem on his cat, Tazzy, and I’ll end with this as a mark of our friendship of a number of years now, first formed reading together and discussing on one of the three listservs I still maintain, George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
The Cat Words
Our cat is old, she feels the cold
She sleeps beside a heater
Her world is shrunk to just one room
A basket on the kitchen floor
A food bowl, water, litter tray
No need for cat flap any more
She does not pass the kitchen doorA scarecrow, gaunt and deaf, she croaks,
A silent purr between your palms,
Her skin is thin, her backbone
Pricks beneath the fur you stroke
She cannot jump onto a chair,
Enfeebled legs will not permit her,
Who was so graceful, strong and fast.
The table cloth stays clean at last.Her pleasure used to be to sit
in the front window
and watch the passing street.
But you cannot leave a cat alone
However still she looks
Who cannot get outside in time,
And wees on books.She came to us some six years old
A rescue cat, now is perhaps nineteen.
She put her paws up on my chest,
And she decided it was us.
Dismissing all the rest.The former cat, blocked by a door
Would quietly dig the carpet up.
But she will stand at the door and squawk
Requiring service now now now
Unusual cat, to almost talk.There has been a time when she would wait
While I made breakfast and sat down
To sit upon my lap
A few minutes before wandering off.Allowing of affection
You could not pet a person so
Unharmed by petting, unseduced
Indifferent going on her way
The action left the better.Despite it all, the spark of life
Is still alight, you have a healthy
Appetite for what you like,
An unexpected turn of speed
When chicken scraps appear.
O sweety puss, O kitty cat,
A dragging leg today,
Is not a good sign I fear …— Martin Notcutt
Tazzy, December 2014
The admiral’s legs (upper thighs during the day, and calves at night with shooting pains suddenly) had been bothering him so much that fall that he stopped going to the gym. He had rotator cuff on one of his shoulders. No not a good sign. But we did have a good New year’s Eve that year, went to an Elvis show, and then danced to band, and drank until 1 at the Kennedy Center great hall (“Elvis has left the building”). Comfort and fun we didn’t know was not to be had again. There was life left yet and the pussycat above is right near a warm comforting fire, there are rugs.
We no longer have fires here. No one to make them.
Sylvia
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
There was some insightful talk on religion on C18-l today. One person wrote (in part) in explanation of Dawkins’s The God Delusion: “there are those who consider that all the good that Christianity has provoked is outweighed, even heavily outweighed, by the harm that it has done, is doing and will shortly do. If you add to that assessment the slippery slope argument, that the best of religions comfort and thereby encourage, however involuntarily, the fact-denying, throat-cutting worst … ” I liked where he echoed Richard Feynman in the speech Feynman gave when Feynman resigned from the (corrupt, compromised) Academy of Science. It’s called “The Value of Science” and in one passage Feynman’s words mean “the wonders of the natural world are greater in scale and profundity than anything that religion can dream up and that [is] the proper study of the human race” (or mankind as Pope would say).
Another talked of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life where the argument is “religion is in fact a basic societal need, of which organized religions are the expressions, while many other forms can also exist: football, concerts or theater going, etc., are also as such legitimate forms of religion. The issue then becomes that of understanding and replacing rather than eradicating, which can be done through education: which is what Durkheim’s works contributes to. The true nature of religion as a basic societal need allows one to understand its organized forms, while giving hope one day to be able to replace them …”
Today I was reading Diane Johnson’s review of Peter Touhey’s Jealousy in the NYRB (for Jan 8, 2015); Touhey writes what people fear strongly is to be “excluded from ‘the circle of love and esteem’ that humans crave.” That explains the repeating images of a movie that has come to be regarded as a Christmas movie: Richard Curtis’s Love Actually. What it provides are many images of individuals in circles of caring love. Why this family-centered Christmas has evolved. The basic societal or human need is provided by that movie and these family- or friend-centered rituals. And if you have no one to be with or if those you are with make if clear the last thing they want is to be with you, you are made to feel terrible. There are stories written about this (they are called “anti-Christmas” stories, e.g., Jane Gardam’s “The Christmas Parasite“).
I have one-third of my sister’s ashes in a cardboard box on an upper shelf in my closet. One-third we sent (surreptitiously because I gather it’s illegal) to a place in northern England, where she taught one semester, and a colleague there scattered them on the River Aln. One-third, her five year old daughter, my sister, and I scattered on the Mississippi River just a block from her house in St. Cloud, MN. And then there is this third. I don’t want to scatter it anywhere. I want it up there in my closet. I don’t know why, but you are making me think of why and maybe if I ever will. Our family was smashed to hell by this death, and then my mother’s, and I so missed the big family holidays for years. But now, I try to have many many small holidays, all of them: St. Lucy’s, though I have no daughters, Purisima, though I am not Catholic, Solstice, which has become SUCH a comfort to me, then Christmas Eve and Christmas, Hannukah, Diwali, Boxing Day, Hogmany–having students from all over and travel has taught me a lot of them….We built a fire for the first time in four years on Solstice. Next time I am near Washington, I will come build one for you. Meanwhile, sending you warmth, Ellen.
I’m afraid of fire you see. I’ve a story of child abuse (of me) to tell but will refrain tonight. I used to love the fires Jim made: for so many years he did it regularly and also when the power went off. Yes come and visit me if ever you can.
Thanks for sharing about Jim’s cremation. I am sure, in time, it will come to you and the girls what to do about Jim’s ashes. Mark says we could find a nice place overlooking Lyme Bay, if that is what the three of you decide. I hope you have a good day tomorrow.
Clare
Charlie has written to say we should talk about it more, the idea each step is a step further away from the time he was alive. Each so painful, Clare.
I know love. It took three years before I felt like going on. I just kept going and eventually it came right. If you need to talk about jim, do so. Just be careful who you chose to confide in. Some people are unable to face another’s pain.
A very moving post. May I say that Jim’s Rupert Brooke homage surprised a laugh out of me, and that Tazzy gave my heart a wrench, too.
Me: Jim had some surprising all the human tastes. He laughed at himself for it but I have three books of poems by Betjeman. In this — you’ll understand — he reminds me of Trollope. He loathed (he did) so many things about England (especially the class system) and yet he’d sit and read those poems. He would have laughed at Lark Pies to Cranchesterford and got the allusion to where Thatcher was born (Grantham from Downton Abbey is an allusion to Thatcher, complimentary of course). Trollope hated his public school years and yet there he was reading his Horace late in life …
Oh I’ll add that when we stayed in the Landmark trust flats in Cloth Fair, London, one of them was a flat that Betjeman had lived in for years; it had his old books in it; a photograph album of family and friend’s pictures that had been his or some friend or family member’s.
Ah, what a good cat poem! What a good cat is Tazzy, too. Of course we hear about people going and scattering their loved one’s ashes all the time. We don’t hear so much about those who mean and plan to do it, but don’t seem to get around to it, somehow. That must be common. We still have Peter’s mother’s ashes in an urn, despite her specific wish to be scattered “where there are flowers.” My friend Cathy still hasn’t done it, though Herbert specifically put in his will that he wanted to be scattered at Bearpaw, by his wife, son and friends – and none of us have even gone up there since then. I don’t think it’s an unwillingness to do that final act; they’re gone, all right, we know that. Maybe in some cases it’s inertia…or it just comes to seem too complicated…
A friend who has done pastoral work — and thus been at funerals and tried to help people cope with death — has told me that having ashes whether in an urn or box presents fraught problems. The urn at least prevents it from being shoved somewhere like old shoes; that makes some relatives and friends angry if they discover this, but what are people who don’t have attics going to do with the ashes as they are the person’s remains. My mother-in-law finally buried my father-in-law’s ashes; many years later in a small plot with a small stone and an inscription to mark the place.
Heartbreaking, very very sad sounds almost trite. You convey the sense of your enormous loss with great feeling. Thankfully you have your cats and daughters to comfort you. Today is also very grey and windy here, but the rain has stopped.
I haven’t written like this in a long while. This ritual day brought it out; well the ritual time brought me to realize that the ashes left from burning Jim’s remains were in the urn, and that is what is left, here in his house, kept together there.
I’m just now reading a very moving book, Colm Toibin’s Nora Webster, by happenstance about a newly widowed woman. Toibin says a lot less explicitly than I do, but also less than some of the other books I’ve read about widowhood or this terrible loss, but he conveys a lot through the circumstances he tells. As I read it, I half-hide my face with my hand. I don’t know what to do about what happened, the whole thing which I have never gotten myself to tell for real (too painful, too revealing),nor what to do with this time I’ve got to get through to come. The heroine of this book has less choices. The book shows how families can and do make things worse in many ways — Toibin is truthful about family life in all his books.
I also bought the first volume of the Elena Ferrante’s trilogy: my treat to myself at Christmas, to read things having nothing to do with anything I usually do as a scholar, to teach, socially &c&c
I was supposed to have the third volume of scripts from Downton Abbey (3rd season), but it got lost in transit so I have to complain to Amazon.uk for a refund (though I’d prefer them to try again).
It’s not raining here today; it’s warmish, a light blue (winter) sky, everything bare. My Clarycat sticks very close to me all the time, now in my lap. Izzy is playing very nice Christmas music (old fashioned Revels kind of thing) and has the Spotify loud enough so I can hear it.
Life is hard and since I grew older — maybe from my twenties I became aware of this — Christmas behaviors, music, demands &c doesn’t help.