What To Do With a Father's Ashes?

Reverend Danielle Tumminio Hansen is an Episcopal priest and theology professor at Emory University who specializes in "the intersection of trauma and theology." Her father's cremated remains are not, as he asked, spread in Hawaii but in her closet. In this essay, she writes that assisting in the final ceremonies of many others showed her that "ordination and a Ph.D. provide no protection from grief. They just make you vulnerable to it in a different way." Those of us storing cremated remains in corners of our home often believe our loved ones deserve something fitting and final, something more than a Ziploc bag or the cardboard box that contains it. We want to bestow an additional honor; we want to get it right. But that’s as far as we get because action would disrupt the spiritual status quo and that’s a frightening prospect. We might have to acknowledge that their mortality signifies ours, that we don’t know how or when, but one day, we too will return to dust. We might have to recognize that our faith in heaven is a little shakier than we’re letting on. We might have to own that we’re not ready to let that person go because of love or shock or unresolved conflict.