My father was cremated yesterday. He is completely gone now – obliterated.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…

He is more gone now than when he passed away on Sunday, if that’s even possible.

I find it so odd to think of him in those terms… To think of him sitting in a ceramic urn on the counter of my mother’s kitchen, like the soil of a plant that’s not quite sprouted. You would think that somewhere in death there would finally be a little dignity, a little honour, but that’s obviously not the case. I don’t think it ever is.

I remember vividly walking to work one morning and noticing several police cars in front of one of the hotels on Carlton Street here in Toronto. They were parked at oblique angles to each other in the middle of the street, their lights flashing. There were no sirens and the cars were empty. I remember there was a tattered yellow and black strip of police tape hung loosely between two No Parking signs right in front of the hotel entrance that looked like it had been blown there by the wind. Beneath that, on the street, was a dirty pile of pink blankets that appeared to have been left by someone in a great hurry; someone who dropped them running to do the laundry.

I didn’t think anything of it. It was just another Toronto morning, right?

As I walked past the pile of pink thermo blankets piled haphazardly on the pavement, I suddenly noticed a pair of sandaled feet sticking out from beneath the blanket. What struck me as odd was not that someone appeared to be sleeping on the street that morning beneath a dirty stack of blankets, but that the owner of those Birkenstocks was wearing socks! “Who does that?” I thought to myself. Then it occurred to me that this wasn’t some homeless person sleeping on the street, this was a dead person whose life ended the instant they hit the asphalt. I stopped and looked up at the hotel and sure enough; one of the windows on the 23rd floor had been obviously forced open and the curtain from inside the room was flapping gently in the breeze.

I learned much later that a middle-aged woman had stepped out of a cab at 3am that morning, run into the hotel and asked the bleary-eyed Reception clerk for a room on the highest floor possible. She took the elevator up, opened the door, forced the window open, and within seconds was back on the street below.

I’ve never forgotten that day. But what really impacted me was why this woman was still lying on the street in front of the hotel all those hours later? And why was she not properly covered or taken away? It was such an undignified end to an obviously troubled life.

And that’s what bothers me the most about my father; after such a long and eventful life to end up there, in that urn on my mother’s kitchen counter. Where is the honour in that?

I’ve never been one of those people who crumble at the news of death and collapse to the floor in a tearful, sobbing mass. People mistake that for being emotionally detached, or being out of touch with my emotions, or being callous and uncaring, but that’s not it at all.

I’ve always known (don’t ask me how), from as far back as I can remember, that death marks the end of everything. If you’ve ever been knocked out cold, then you know that consciousness is nothing more than a little light that can easily be switched on and off and on again. And when it gets switched off, like when you hit your head very hard on the sidewalk, you instantly succumb to the blackness. There is no time to ponder your options, no time to collect yourself and prepare for the next stage, whatever that is. In that blackness, consciousness ends. And if, by chance, you wake up, all it means is that you were knocked unconscious. And if you don’t wake up, you’re dead. It’s a simple as that. When the blackness comes, it takes you, your personality, your memories, everything that is you, with it. A lot of people believe otherwise, but isn’t that just wishful thinking?

And so my father is there now, lost forever in that blackness. All that remains are our memories of him, a few photographs, some videos. All that remains is the chalky grey dust in an urn on my mother’s kitchen counter…

Death can be so tasteless…