Granny in a Box

In the spring of 1977, it became clear that my grandmother couldn’t take care of herself living across the country from the rest of her family in Philadelphia. She was moved from Seattle to Philadelphia and within weeks they had her in a retirement community. There was a variety of assisted-living options at the facility in Germantown where we put her, from hospital-type daily care to individual apartments where somebody would look in on her. It was the latter option we chose for my grandmother.

The place actually had the appearance of a low-security correctional facility, with its high fence of iron bars. My father jokingly referred to it as the granny lock-up. She would spend the last eight years of her life there. In the end when she was in the hospital and it was clear she was dying, my father told me that I should go and say goodbye to her. When I got out to see her that Saturday she didn’t seem to be conscious of anybody in the room, even with glassy eyes open. I held her hand for a few hours and then left when visiting hours were over. Two days later, on Monday, March 18, she was dead.

My father made arrangements with his undertaker friend, Billy Phillips, to have my grandmother cremated, though not much else was done. No funeral or memorial service of any kind. There was talk of buying an urn for her ashes or at least scattering them somewhere, but nothing ever came of it. When the ashes arrived from the mortuary in a cardboard box, it sat on the kitchen table for a couple of days until my father decided to store her on the shelf in the first floor coat closet. She would spend the next ten years there.

My father would occasionally trot out the box, so her grandchildren could pay their respects. We reminded my father on more than one of these occasions that they made urns for the interment of remains. The reality was my father was just too cheap to pay for an urn and perhaps had grown fond of having his mother around. I’m not sure what my aunt’s take was on her mother’s ashes remaining in the cardboard box in my father’s closet.

There were also Thanksgiving dinners at which my father would make a place for the box at the table. My father’s friends and family seemed to pass it off as yet another of my father’s eccentricities. One day I went over to his house to find the cardboard box open on the coffee table and my father sifting through the ashes in the plastic bag within.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him.

“The sons of bitches took the gold teeth!”

“You’re not serious,” I said, but knowing full well that no one in his right mind opens a box of human ashes unless he is serious. “Gold would practically vaporize at the temperatures used in cremation.”

“Well, Billy said they sometimes remove the gold teeth beforehand and then toss them in with the ashes.”

I just shook my head. Not only was my father trying to save a few bucks by not buying an urn, he thought he could actually make a few bucks by selling my grandmother’s gold teeth.

My grandmother’s ashes were finally put to rest after my father’s death. In his will my father requested that his ashes be mixed with his mother’s and dumped into the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. My stepmother took a portion of his ashes, mixed them with his mother’s and dumped them unceremoniously into the river. For the dispensation of the rest of my father’s ashes see “Rocket’s Red Glare: Launching the Ashes of The Living Legend”.