My Father's Ashes - what he left behind
by Al, Michigan, U.S.A. , Aged 62
My mother and father were divorced when I was very young and they had not really seen each other for years but as we saw him over the years he, my brothers and I had come to believe that the body is only a container for who and what we are. When Dad died, his body was cremated but because there was no room in the cemetary where he was to be interred we gave the ashes to my younger brother to keep until the cemetary expanded. Over the years we all pretty much forgot about the ashes themselves until the day my mother was cleaning up some belongings of my brother in her basement. She found that the ashes of my father, her deceased ex-husband, had been stored in her basement for several years without her knowing that they were there. Not sharing our views on life and death, she was quite "freaked" out by the fact that they had been there and felt quite insulted that the rest of us could do nothing but laugh at her indignation.
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