Making an Exit

by Sarah Murray

  Many were unable to, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their stories—in compressed form—appear on the stones of cemeteries such as the one at South Park Street Cemetery. They tell of those who died “young and fair,” in the “vigour of life,” the “season of innocence.” These long-gone imperialists died from illnesses that were “long and tedious,” “lingering and painful,” or as we learn from Martha’s tombstone, ones that brought a “most agonizing pain.” Small wonder then that, as Kipling noted, at parties in the fall, “those who were alive gathered together to felicitate themselves on having come through another hot season.”

  For those who didn’t make it, the end was brutal and sudden, even in the twentieth century. Living in India during the Second World War, Margery Hall remembers the death of “little Tommy Rushton” during a monsoon. “He was playing in the garden in the morning, at eleven. He was buried at six that night. It was as quick as that,” she recalls. “He was buried in a downpour, where the grave was full of water. They just dropped the coffin into a lake.”

  In a climate where, as Hall puts it, “you went bad so quickly,” burial had to be swift. Fergus Innes remembers the time the deputy commissioner of a remote district in what’s now Pakistan was taken ill with a high fever. With no doctors near and the prognosis bleak, the assistant commissioners decided to get a coffin ready. However, the patient rallied and next morning was feeling much better. “He had his bed carried out onto the verandah to get some little bit of fresh air,” recalled Innes. “As he lay there, what did he see but the man working. And he said, ‘Who are you and what’s that?’ And the man turned round and said to him, ‘The box has come for Your Honor.’”

  With people around them dropping like flies, the Brits tried desperately to make India feel like home. When the summer heat of Calcutta got too much, they headed to the slopes of the Himalayas at Simla, shifting the machinery of government more than seven thousand feet above sea level every year at a time when mule carts were the best India had to offer in transportation logistics.

  On the slopes of Simla, they surrounded themselves with the familiar, building mock Tudor cottages and Scottish baronial lodges decked out in chintzes and with names like Annandale or Mount Pleasant. “You had more or less ordinary English furniture,” remembers Major-General William Odling. “You took your own pictures, and china, and silver, and glass, and linen, and those sorts of things.” They engaged in amateur dramatics and held fancy dress parties, observing social distinctions more rigidly in India than in England. They were, recalls Philip Mason, expected to “keep up a front” and “dress for dinner in the jungle.”

  But in spite of the crockery and tea cozies, the Brits still felt of India that they were “strangers by her streams,” as Mary Leslie, a colonial poet, put it in 1858. They might build Gothic Revival mansions, but they couldn’t stop the troops of monkeys gamboling across the tennis lawns. Indian nature often interfered with the British way of death, too. At the 1916 funeral of Sir Alexander Pinhey in Hyderabad, writes Jan Morris in Stones of Empire, the bees nesting under the roof of the residency’s portico were “so angry to be awoken by the strains of the harmonium that they sent the gun-carriage horses bolting down the drive.”

  Of course, some Brits thrived on the difference, and the chance to live bigger lives overseas than they could have done on their small, rainy island. But many longed for home. “Dear, dear England!” declared Susanna Moodie, a British-born Victorian author who described with passion her life as a settler in the Canadian wilderness—and her feelings of homesickness. “What heinous crime had I committed, that I, who adored you, should be torn from your sacred bosom, to pine out my joyless existence in a foreign clime? Oh, that I might be permitted to return and die upon your wave-encircled shores, and rest my weary head and heart beneath your daisy-covered sod at last!”

  Perhaps after all, then, Martha Goodlad felt more like she was living “in a foreign field” than in somewhere that was “forever England.” And if, like Moodie, Martha and the occupants of South Park Street Cemetery had hoped one day to return to the “wave-encircled shores” they called home, their wishes were not granted. What’s more, in an era when mail took up to six months to reach India, family back in England might not receive word of their deaths until some time after the fact, so would continue corresponding long after the funeral. A special place was established in Calcutta to manage this undeliverable mail. It was called the Dead Letter Office.

  * * *

  After her mother died in 1997, my friend Sheila was thinking about an appropriate place to scatter her mother’s ashes. She knew her mother wanted to be cremated, and that no flowers should be sent (her mother had always hated cut flowers; she saw them as dead things), but a suitable location for her remains didn’t immediately spring to mind.

  Widowed twenty years earlier, Sheila’s mother spent the last eighteen months of her life in a nursing home, sad and depressed. Her happiest times had been the years just before the Second World War, when she and her husband, then newly married, lived in a flat in London’s Maida Vale opposite the Warrington, an imposing Art Nouveau pub. “She used to speak fondly of Sunday afternoons, when they would stagger home from the pub with their friends, and she would try to slice the runner beans for lunch with an inexpert and unsteady hand,” says Sheila.

  After the war, the couple moved out to the suburbs and never visited the Warrington again. Sheila, however, happened to live near it, and opposite the pub was a large roundabout, which she’d pass every morning around 7 A.M. on her way to the swimming pool. It was always imaginatively planted with shrubs, herbs, and grasses. This, Sheila realized, would be a perfect spot on which to scatter the ashes—it was within sight of the place where her mother had been so happy and she’d be amid living, growing plants.

  “Knowing I’d have to be discreet, I stopped one day and scattered her ashes on the roundabout, where, as luck would have it, they’d just planted rosemary, for remembrance,” says Sheila. “The ashes were remarkably granular, and some of them lodged in the turn-ups of the rather natty trousers I was wearing that day. I still use that route regularly and I metaphorically tip my hat to her as I pass the roundabout. The rosemary has long gone, but the memory lingers on.”

  Whether your spiritual home is next to Marilyn Monroe or on a London roundabout, the task of getting your remains there becomes a whole lot easier if it doesn’t involve a corpse. As cremated remains, the dead are highly portable. They can take flight—sometimes literally.

  From Seattle, Aerial Missions operates an airborne ash-scattering service across the coastal waters, rivers, lakes, and mountain peaks of the Pacific Northwest. Jim Howard, a commercial pilot, and his wife Wendy, a licensed notary, launched the business after scattering Jim’s father’s ashes in the Adirondacks in New York State. “He loved it there,” says Jim on the company’s Web site. “I remember traveling the lake by boat and scattering his ashes at many of his favorite spots and areas along the lake … It felt to me like we were setting a human soul free, to drift on the currents of the wind and water.”

  The International Scattering Society has taken this concept and run with it globally. Calling itself “the travel agency for the deceased,” the Missouri-based company can release your ashes over destinations such as Venice, the Swiss Alps, Cancún beach, Stonehenge, and even Mount Everest.

  Some have planned even more ambitious post-cremation journeys—trips into outer space. Since, 1982, a Houston-based company called Celestis has been arranging for small portions of human ashes to boldly go where no ashes have gone before. The service, which piggybacks on commercial or scientific satellite launches, has attracted celebrities, the most appropriate being Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, whose ashes, or at least a handful of them, went into orbit in 1997.

  The portability of ashes opens up all kinds of possibilities. Volleyball athlete Misty May-Treanor has been taking small pots of her mother’s ashes with her to sporting events.
At the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, she sprinkled some on the court before the beach volleyball semi-final, where she and Kerri Walsh won the match. She did the same thing four years later in Beijing, where her mother’s ashes also worked their magic. “We can’t leave her home alone,” she told reporters after the match.

  Send-offs for ashes are becoming quite theatrical, too. Perhaps most spectacular is the conflagration arranged by Angels Flight, a California company that loads cremated remains into specially modified shells and explodes them in the sky in a fireworks display.

  Since they’re in no danger of further decay, the cremated dead enjoy a more relaxed time schedule than a regular corpse. They can wait around until relatives find an appropriate slot in their diaries to get together for a scattering—or until the seasons change. Sam and I waited five months before we scattered Fa’s ashes, hoping that May would bring us a sunny spring day with conditions that were, as he’d suggested, “calm, with no more than light winds.”

  Cremation gives the dead mobility. No longer tied to sanctified burial grounds, their options for final resting places become far more interesting. We may decide to return home. On the other hand, we could find a spot next to those we loved. Perhaps we’ll end up in a favorite lake or on a mountain peak. Of course, many “cremains,” as they’re known, are simply buried, or even left on the funeral director’s shelves. But once our bodies have been freed from the shackles of weight, volume, and putrefaction, decisions on where to make a “home” for our remains become less practical and more romantic and philosophical.

  So where does that leave me? If I’m cremated, I can choose from an infinite selection of destinations. If friends are not available or willing to do the scattering, I can call on the services of companies like Aerial Missions or the International Scattering Society.

  But if the “how” of my final ending is now easier to organize, the “where” is a question that continues to perplex me. I’m a child of globalization. I’ve matured alongside it—when I first started traveling, communicating with family and friends meant collecting letters from the Poste Restante sections of post offices. Now my computer goes everywhere with me and I connect with people online, often without revealing where I am at any given time. Home is often my in-box.

  I’ve also learned to call home wherever I’ve been happy—and that includes many places. There’s Dorset, where I was born. There’s the tiny 1860s terrace house in Edinburgh near the Victorian bathhouse where, as students, my roommate Lucinda and I would book adjacent cubicles and spend whole afternoons submerged in piping hot water in the huge ceramic tubs installed at a time when homes didn’t come with bathrooms.

  I’ve had many flats in London, as well as my “illegal erection” in Hong Kong. There was Cape Town, where in the house I borrowed one summer, I was followed everywhere by the owners’ posse of affectionate dogs. There’s the apartment in Hanoi, where each morning I woke to the sounds of women selling fresh bread as they yelled down the alley, “Bánh mì!” (“Good bread here!”) And now, of course, there’s New York, where my apartment houses a coffin I commissioned for myself in the shape of the Empire State Building.

  How can I choose from among all these places? Is any one of them more my home than another? But do I even have to leave my remains at home? On my travels over the years, there’ve been times when, looking across a valley in the Himalayas or wandering through a crowded street market in Mexico, I’ve experienced a rush of exhilaration, a feeling that I could happily drop dead there and then. Wouldn’t one of those places make a suitable home for my remains?

  * * *

  The day has come to scatter my father’s ashes. My mother and I are in The Hut. Sam put the urn in here, no doubt because it was a convenient place to store it, but it suddenly strikes me as appropriate that his remains have been lodged here. Some of his possessions have gone, but his computer is still on the desk watching over the proceedings—the computer on which he typed out the instructions we’re now doing our best to follow.

  “Listen, darling,” says Sam in her no-nonsense voice. “I know how to do this—I’ve done it with soap powder.” With a pair of kitchen scissors, she snips away at a thick plastic bag so its contents, tightly packed inside a steel pot, can flow out more freely. I’m worried that if we open the bag too wide, what’s inside will spill out in a rush. Sam, however, is in household-chore mode. She’s convinced her method will work—and, as usual, she’s right. Suddenly our task is much easier. But before we can go on, we find ourselves on the floor, weeping with laughter at the absurdity of what she’s just said. For, of course, the dust we’re decanting isn’t from the inside of a vacuum cleaner or a cereal packet. This dust was once a living, breathing human being: my father.

  The reason Sam and I have embarked on the strange task of decanting my father’s ashes is that we soon realized they’d be impossible to scatter from within the thick plastic bag stuffed inside the urn. We’re going to put them into something else first. Fa’s letter specified that a “polythene bag will suffice,” and as it turns out, a plastic bag is what he gets—two of them, in fact. One is from Fortnum & Mason, the posh London department store; the other from the less pricey but thoroughly British chain Marks & Spencer.

  The idea is that when we start scattering the ashes, we won’t attract attention (we didn’t, as my father suggested, secure “prior approvals” as we thought this might complicate matters unnecessarily). It was Sam who devised the plan: we’ll carry the ashes in the bags, and when we’re ready, we’ll snip the corners and stroll around casually, letting the contents trail out onto the ground. I feel sure Fa would appreciate the ingenuity of our little scheme.

  My sister, Kate, is not with us. She’s in London but asked us to let her know when we’d be carrying out Fa’s scattering, so we telephoned her in the morning. She’s happy with our plan so, with nuclear family approval secured, Sam and I set off.

  It’s May and the hedgerows are thick with cow parsley, blackberry brambles, wild garlic, and curling ferns, all jostling for position in their gloriously crowded habitat. At this time of year, Dorset’s narrow lanes—many of them dug deep into the earth—become dark tunnels of green pierced by pale shoots that reach up to catch the rays of sunlight.

  The route we’re following takes us past all our old Dorset homes and family landmarks. First, Spickhatch, the rented house in West Milton in which my parents lived at the time I was born. When we moved to Pear Tree Farm, a couple of miles away, our cat Porgy—perhaps driven by a homing instinct similar to that of America’s early Chinese immigrants and Native Indians—would often return to Spickhatch. Whenever he went missing we’d find him prowling around the garden as if he still owned the place.

  As we continue on our route, I notice that one of the bags containing Fa’s ashes is pressing against my leg, gently molding itself around my ankle. Is that my father at my feet, creating this cushion for my right limb? He would have almost certainly dismissed the idea. Nevertheless, I feel a certain comforting presence in the crushed bone dust nestling at my feet—a protector against any number of ferocious farm dogs.

  We reach a junction in the road. At this point, in the days when our home was Pear Tree Farm, we would have taken a left-hand turn down a steeply sloping tree-covered lane, which takes you to the hamlet in which we lived for several decades—Loscombe, a collection of houses and farms so small and hidden that, whenever a car went by our house, we’d rush to the window to see who was in it.

  Today, instead of taking this road, we continue up the hill. Near the top, we stop at the entrance to a field. Sam and I get out of the car to take in the view of Loscombe and of our old house. It looks little changed at this distance, although Sam and I know that the present owners have in fact done a great deal to it. My father bought Pear Tree Farm in 1964 from a local farmer. It came with two fields, a barn, and a cowshed. I still think of the little valley surrounding it as “ours.”

  It’s about now I realize that, while we hadn�
��t planned it this way, we’re on a sort of tour of Fa’s life in Dorset. More than forty years of his existence are bound up in these narrow lanes and muddy fields. As a surveyor and agricultural consultant, he’s trodden most of this ground. Now after several years of being grounded by illness, he’s out and about again, surveying his territory—for I still can’t help feeling he’s here with us, a tangible presence on the floor of the car.

  Arriving at the church of St. Mary Magdalene, we park and walk up a narrow path toward it. The church’s setting and tiny scale is utterly charming, while a Gothic spire distinguishes its otherwise modest form. At the churchyard entrance, a bright yellow sign tacked onto a telephone pole reads: DANGER OF DEATH, and shows a simplified image of a man being hit by an electric current.

  Fortunately, once we get inside, the only danger appears to be a large black male sheep, accompanied by a smaller white female one. They’re there, we suppose, to keep the churchyard grass cut. They look ancient—and rather threatening. Still, they merely stare passively on at our arrival. Also in attendance are five magnificent pheasants and their hens. My father always admired these birds. In remembrance of his shooting days he’d sometimes, on seeing one, raise an invisible gun and pretend to fire. In the company of this curious bestial gathering of onlookers, I let a few grains of ash trail around the edge of the graves of Jim and Dood.

  Okay, so it’s not exactly what my father had specified, which was to be scattered in the churchyard itself. However, the amount of ash left by my father is not insubstantial (the average cremated male leaves behind seven pounds or so), and I was worried it would damage the graveyard grass, so we separated off a tiny portion, which we decanted into the Fortnum & Mason bag, to sprinkle around his friends’ graves. The rest, we’re going to distribute nearby.