Live Weight
Lilacs and ashes, birth and death

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services

May 31, 2007

The young woman handed me the box I’d put off claiming for three years. It was time. I knew it as soon as the funeral home called. But how strange to get the call today, of all days — this day of joy, relief and anticipation. My niece had just gone into labor.

There was a small legal ritual conducted on the front porch. I had to sign a release form and officially “take custody” of the contents. But what truly surprised me was the weight of the box. I let loose an involuntary “whoa” as I hefted it, and felt a tug along the length of both arms. I’ll bet it weighed seven pounds, maybe eight … about as much, it later occurred to me, as a newborn.

On a day frothy with the joy of new life, I took custody of my wife’s ashes.

I have survived three years of grief mostly by defying the traditional framework of bereavement, beginning with the term “laying the body to rest.” The image of a corpse sleeping makes me shudder. It’s part of the “buried alive” syndrome I’ve observed at some funerals, where the officiator shovels platitudes about death atop the departed instead of allowing us to feel and cry publicly over the jagged edges of our loss.

What matters is the life the person has lived, and comfort is to be found in celebrating that life, not seeing it dispatched to some anonymous hereafter as quickly as possible.

And making too much of the body — the vacated shell — has always seemed to me the height of profanity to that truth. So I was hardly prepared for the complexity of emotions that accompanied my tardy assumption of custody of Barbara’s ashes, on this day that I was about to become a great uncle.

How real it felt — that was the surprise. After three years of savoring Barbara’s spirit, of subsisting on nothing but memories and photographs, here I was, carrying upstairs, to temporary storage in a little-used closet, something with weight and substance: not a memento or possession, but her, or what used to be her. There was a simple, direct link between the contents of this box and the body my daughter and I embraced moments after Barbara died, in bed, at home, on a rainy afternoon when lilacs were blooming.

Last time I saw the body, wrapped in a blue-sheet shroud, two hospice workers were porting it downstairs. They had to remove it out the back door because the city had just repaved the sidewalk in front of our house and the cement was still wet.

That distant moment came back full force — the immediacy of losing Barbara, of saying goodbye, of holding my daughter and crying. I felt all that in the weight of the box that tugged at my forearms, as though the mystery of life and death could be reduced to seven pounds of dust. As I carried the box upstairs, I felt like a pallbearer.

That evening my niece gave birth to a son, and my attention leapt to the cry of life and the rapt awe a newborn inspires. But what symmetry there is, I thought, to the transitions on either end of life.

I don’t believe in rebirth, exactly, but I understand the impulse to believe in it, if only because, every year, winter yields to spring. Those who leave us keep on nourishing us. It’s all part of the same miracle.

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com.