Ashes to Ashes,
- Rayven Holmes
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Dust to dust...
I wanted to write this months ago, but I think the emotions were still too raw for me to articulate in a manner that was beyond babbling sobs. I’ve learned a lot of things about ashes, specifically of the human remains variety, over the past couple of years.
I learned on the day my mother was cremated that while there are all sorts of buttons and settings trained professionals use to ensure the machine works as intended, there’s still one master button that starts the whole show. And they’ll let you press it.
Everything goes into the machine. Those pretty, overpriced flowers, the letter you wrote, the plastic bracelets that they would of had to cut to remove, the clothes, and the casket. All of it burns, so you only get a few casket options: a cardboard box, a simple pine box, or an elegant wooden casket with beautiful linen lining. We opted for the elegant wooden casket. I don’t think I would have survived seeing my mother in a cardboard box. Or maybe I would have. Maybe, in another timeline, a far more bitter version of me picks the cardboard box, drinks a bottle of red wine, and moves on. I hope that version of me knows peace.
Once it all burns, there’s still chunks of bone leftover that they grind down until all that’s left is a fine powder. Trauma powder.
Ashes aren’t light, not at first. The grief gives them an otherworldly quality that allows the mental weight to transfer into physical weight.
You won’t see the bag at first. At least not in my case. We had already agreed on an urn, and so in she went. I opened the urn at one point after the repass, the metal cremation tag glared up at me, and I felt a sea of panic swell inside of me before I hastily refastened the lid and decided that I never needed to look into that black hole of grief ever again. The memory of this takes some work to recall, as all memories from those first few weeks do. Your memories of those moments will be like the smoke from the cremation stacks, dissipating in the breeze, leaving only an essence of grief behind.
If you need to play trauma powder hot potato with your next of kin, USPS is the only one authorized to ship ashes, and there are steps involved. I didn’t have this particular brand of trauma thrust on me; my brother wanted nothing to do with our mother’s remains, but a friend did, and it was as traumatic a process as you think it is.
If you buy the fancy metal urn and then decide to fly with your bag of trauma, you will need to go purchase a TSA-approved urn. These harken back to the casket choices, cardboard or wood.
The funeral home offered the cardboard one for free. A year and a half later, and I still had the same visceral reaction to the thought of my mother in a cardboard box. So a wooden one was purchased. It’s beautiful, but like my heart, its suffered some dings along the way to now.
The hardest part wasn’t deciding if I would finally go the affordable route and stick my mom in a cardboard box. That no was easy. It came from a wound that was cut from years of yearning. The hard part was taking her out of the metal urn, carefully, I was terrified the plastic bag would rip, and I’d be covered in the remnants of my mother. And then sitting there, staring at the bag of ashes that flopped into my lap.
There is something mind-shattering about realizing you’re holding what used to be a person, a person that you loved despite all the reasons not to, in your lap. The ashes look no different than the remnants of a campfire. Dull, gray, and fine. They shift and flow like sand. An hourglass of one’s humanity, contained in a plastic bag.
I was immobilized.
As if time had stood still and I was once again sitting on the bright green grass outside the crematory, under a tree so full of life in the middle of summer, weeping. I cradled the bag like a newborn baby as we made our way to the funeral home, where they, respectfully, took the bag of ash that was once my mother from me and placed her in the wooden box that would be her new home. It’s been roughly nine months since then, and I finally got the courage a few weeks ago to unscrew the bottom of the wooden box and slide off the top. I needed to know that it was her in there.
Like that ride home after the funeral, I needed to see with my own eyes that this was once my mother. And as the little metal glittered in the morning light back at me, I breathed a sigh of relief before closing the box and sealing it shut. Letting the grief wash over and through me and then continuing on my day.
Will I open it again? I don’t know. I do know that each yesterday makes the weight of today a bit easier to carry, and for that, I’m thankful.
Copyright(c) 2026 Rayven Holmes
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