Practice
The wry, sometimes even dark, sense of humor emanating from Laurene, my mother, hit just about any audience as delightfully unexpected — in part because she was a lay Buddhist nun, ordained in Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Order of Interbeing, and in part because of her generally sincere, warm orientation toward others. Each dry comment, each subtle joke, was a revelation even to those of us who knew her well or long enough to be unlikely to still register surprise. But register we did. To wit — frugal to the very last, she left me a note, perfect Catholic-school cursive sprawling across the top of the “urns for purchase” page in the crematorium’s informational booklet: I urge you to skip the box. I could see her irreverent grin floating off the page, coloring each letter. Even she seemed surprised and delighted by the amusement she took in the world, by her own wry perspective bubbling up in her being.
In the winter months after she died in December of 2024, all of the birdseed and sundry birdfeeding supplies that had sat by her bedroom’s sun-washed sliding glass door ended up in my own sun room, along with many of her other belongings. One February afternoon, trying to sort through her things and reclaim the now-chaotic room, I came across a black plastic box with a clear plastic bag of grey sand or gravel in it, a box that had been among the bags of birdseed by her door for nearly four years, the colored plastic slowly fading in the sun. What is this, I thought — sand for icy conditions? A nutrient to add to the birdfood? Then, a truly outlandish thought hit me: is this… someone? Indeed, a small, cream-colored piece of cardstock lodged under the plastic bag read “Cremated Remains of Eulan B. Hines,” accompanied by a thin metal cremation ID tag – a tag for a soldier marching off to his own personal battle in which there was no winning. Without comment nor warning, my highly-organized mother had left me with the ashes of a man to whom she was married for all of one year in the late aughts. Here was Bud, about whom I still know nearly nothing, sunning himself in the light of my sunroom.
My mother donated her body to a medical school, and when the students there have learned all they can from her, she too will be cremated. I don’t know where I will scatter her ashes. This winter, I plan to finally release Bud into the Connecticut River, send the dust and bone shards of him downriver. Perhaps this was a final, cosmic sort of joke on my mother’s part; perhaps it was one of the only ways in which she failed in her quest for Buddhist non-attachment. But I like to think of it as her giving me a chance to practice letting go, practice attending to her proposal that I simply skip the box and send her dust and shards back out into the world.
Fight Like A Mother: A Celebration of Resistance and Resilience.
A Mother’s Day Poetry Collection