Dust to dust, but ashes to where?

What to do with the ghost in the attic

The Funeral of Shelley, Louis Édouard Fournier 1889, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. But what happened to the ashes?

It was four hours after the recent funeral of my much-loved mother-in-law and the extended family was gathered in a living room near Guildford. And it was then that I discovered the departed might be coming to join us at home and that if she did, she would be reunited in a cupboard upstairs with her husband Gwyn and our two late Kerry Blue terriers. A discussion ensued which I daresay I should have left till some other time. How, I wondered too publicly, had our household managed to earn the urns?

This unexpected urnership had happened to me before. After my dad died a quarter of a century ago the family had assumed following his funeral his ashes had been disposed of by his partner of 20 years. Since she wouldn’t speak to any of us after the funeral so we couldn’t find out. A decade later the funeral directors contacted me via work to say that they still had him on a shelf and would I come and collect him? They’d tried phoning and writing to his partner for the best part of a decade and had no reply.

So I drove to the funeral directors, where his plain urn stood on a shelf alongside other orphan ashes, picked him up and a week later his family scattered him on Hampstead Heath, probably illegally. Most of him was deposited by a grand oak that stood alone and was a famous local landmark. It had stood for a century or more and would surely stand for a century more; it blew down five years later.

This scattering seemed right to me since my dad had loved the Heath. Whereas keeping someone’s ashes in your home felt strange. As soon as I knew that all these remains were now bestowed around the house, I began to imagine them falling out of a carelessly opened closet and covering the carpet in burned corpse. Many readers will remember the scene in the film Meet The Parents when Greg Focker pops the cork on a bottle of champagne, which knocks over an urn containing the ashes of his future father-in-law’s doted-upon mother. The cat then makes unpleasant use of the resulting pile.

But it wasn’t just the possibility of accidents. The thought of being in the same house as human remains creeped me out, as the Americans say. My brain is quite equal to the job of imagining those ashes somehow recomposing themselves into a kind of grey cloud at dead of night and coming to get me.

I had to admit that my objection to sharing my home with the passed-over was almost as irrational as my wife’s reason for having them there. Which was that she did not like to think of them inhabiting a cold, strange place with which they were unfamiliar. It came down to this: I was frightened by ghosts and she was frightened for them. So much about this whole discussion is entirely irrational.

There was one good rational argument I did come up with, which was that when my wife and I in turn kicked the bucket it would be unfair to leave the children with a morgue’s worth of dead ancestors and pets to have to dispose of. So how would we resolve the issue?

It turns out that this kind of debate is far from unusual. Funerals in movies and on TV invariably depict a coffin being lowered into the ground and the thud of earth on wood. The mourners turn away from the graveside and we catch a glimpse of the murderer, a spurned relative or the FBI looking on from a distance from behind a tree.

But filmic though it may be hardly any of us are interred in this way anymore. My mother-in-law’s cremation took place at the first ever crematorium in Britain, opened in 1885 in Woking in Surrey. A beautiful place with lovely, leafy grounds, it was set up by progressive funeralists as a rational and modern way of dealing with the catastrophic overspill in London caused by too many bodies and not enough cemeteries.

According to the Cremation Society (you can’t help wondering what their Christmas parties are like), from a handful of cremations in 1900, to a third of all disposals in 1960, we now cremate well over 80% of our dead. For some reason in Northern Ireland it’s only a quarter.

This means that there are an awful lot of ashes generated every single day and consequently disputes and accidents concerning them are far from uncommon. Things happens to ashes that can’t happen to coffins: being so much more portable they are stolen off the back seats of cars, left on trains, occasionally even purloined by ex-wives and husbands who claim back after death what they lost in life. A woman recently wrote to an agony aunt asking what she should tell her mother, who planned somehow to filch a cupful of her divorced husband’s ashes and conduct her own ceremony with them at a place she imagined to be appropriate. The agony aunt’s advice began “Stop her”.

Back to our impasse. The way we resolve these things in my family is usually by giving in to the person who feels strongest. Which in this instance was my niece. It turned out that she wanted somewhere she go and visit her late grandmother and remember her, and that somewhere was not a wardrobe in London. There didn’t need to be a plaque or a niche, just some place you wouldn’t mind sitting and reflecting for half an hour.

In other words the kind of place that most sensible people would already have chosen. But when it comes to matters like this, how sensible – how rational - are we, really?

My mother and father -in-law and my wife’s aunt were all from a mining village in South Wales but had left it decades earlier. Today most of the family are in Southern England. So the question was, where would the family like to go and where could we imagine the spirits of the departed being content?

My mother-in-law loved gardens: we settled on Kew. As soon as it was said, we knew it was the right choice.

This piece originally appeared last weekend in the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine. My thanks to Sam Fishwick and Anna Pursglove for commissioning it.