Buying Burial Rites

Finding A Place for My Parents to Rest in Peace

Falling back
into memory

I splash

among realized
dreams

I wish you
could’ve seen

---

My heart lifted as the screen zoomed out to show an aerial view of The Valley of the Temples, nestled in my homeland of Hawai‘i. Sitting 5 hours and 3,732 miles away at my dining room table, I was walking with Pat as she gave me a tour through the place I’d like to bury my parents. Her voice was kind and familiar in its island intonation over the phone; I could hear my own local tilt make its way into my speech as we talked.

My pet rabbit turns eight years old this week. Which means it’s been eight years and some since my dad passed away. His ashes sit in a bag in a wicker box back home, overlooking the living room in a house where my mom rests on her seemingly endless death bed.

Hospice has been in and out of that home for eight years. If you don’t know, hospice sends the folks who help the slowly dying transition from this life. They’ll start visiting more and more when the end nears. A month ago they were visiting three times a week; now it’s down to two. This has happened several times, this surge and then return to none. It could always be next week that she might go or another decade. She hasn’t spoken or gotten out of bed since my dad was still with us.

When he passed, my heart and stomach became one. My eyes were floating in my skull and my skin sat on my muscles as oil sits on water, blanketing and detached. I could feel my existence moving underneath, like soft rolling waves without a break. But none of it breathed. My being was muted.

At the time, my brothers and I went to the cemetery our dad had been visiting to purchase his and her post-mortem solutions. He presumed it would be my mother who would go first. And so, near his own unexpected end, options were being considered. Although, a choice had yet to be closed on.

The four of us circled a group of small stones smooshed into the ground. They looked up at us from their crowded, shared spaces. Our heads down, taking it all in as the bay twinkled in the distance. The large island man who had given our Ken a tour talked animatedly, compassionate in tone albeit heavy on the local salesperson vibes.

We hovered in silence.

The taste of my tongue was heavy. Did he say 15 thousand or 50 thousand? We asked again. I still heard echoes more than numbers. I sensed my eldest brother’s feet shift a few yards away. John was the most distant from us in these moments, literally and figuratively, and my hackles were always up in his presence. Brian squinted his eyes, thumb, and forefinger shooting up to squeeze the bridge of his nose. His lips pursed. Riley stood evenly, his legs making a strong triangle, his hands behind his back and chest out, assuming the police-officer stance his job had engrained in him.

“Hm.”

“That?”

“It looks so small.”

The mood was cloudy as the June sun splashed on our backs.

The man let us know that Ken loved it here because you could see the ocean, and that he didn’t want his ashes to be underneath the ground. Rather, in a capsule placed in one of these stones.

He didn’t want his ashes to be underneath the ground.

I imagine him sitting with his head back in his office chair, eyes closed, mulling over how he’d like to be laid to rest—frowning at the idea of being trapped beneath the Earth, akin to mud, closer than ever to the Devil.

I imagine this, but I have no idea what the thoughts were that got him to this above-ground preference. I’d never heard of such a specific notion regarding the matter. I don’t even know if he believed in the Devil. Or God.

Religion, finances, politics (and sex) were off-the-table conversations in our household. “Those are the subjects that start wars.” He’d never spoken about his beliefs, really. He went to a non-denominational church every Sunday, and I usually joined him. It was sort of our thing. We got dressed up, him in slacks and an aloha shirt, carrying his head confidently under his classic straw-brimmed hat decorated in a unique feather hat band he’d have made just for him. His dressy cowboy boots would click down the sidewalk as young me, often in my favorite floor-length, beige lace dress (which I also wore on Halloween as “Mother Earth”), pranced alongside him, exploring the architecture of the streets as we strolled up early to mingle.

I loved the smell of early mornings like this with him. Hawai‘i always smells a little wet in the mornings. I’d break off to join the kids, and he’d sit in the pews. Later the kids would parade down the aisles for the congregation and sit up top with the reverend as we closed the service. Then, during the closing song of Aloha Oe, I’d rejoin him as we all circled up to hold hands, pass a squeeze, and sing. I loved how he glowed during these outings. With joy from spreading his social butterfly wings, with uplifting tradition, with love for the community and our aloha, with pride for me.

We never really talked about the services. We created shared experiences, and that was that. I assumed my dad believed in God when I was little, and recall nervously slipping him a note at the age of about six at the dinner table that read, “WHat if you DoNt belieVɘ in G0d?” in scratchy misspelled letters on a napkin. I was so scared of his rejection at that moment. He read it quietly, gave me a soft smile and said we’d talk about it later. We never did.

He didn’t push back whatsoever when I went through times of needing space from the church. I had a lot of my own ideas, and it took me time to recognize that I could have my own ideas and also learn from the wisdom of others. He supported us all in our personal journeys. We just didn’t necessarily discuss them amongst ourselves.

I always assumed he believed in a more traditional idea of God. That is why I reeled in defensiveness after his passing when John said he didn’t. And then… it sorta clicked, as likely. As much as I carry distaste for my eldest brother–and initially felt like his adamantly atheist perspective was trying to have more in common with Dad–his insight on Dad’s church habit being for the community and not for the beliefs did sorta make sense. I have to admit that our father did openly enjoy volunteering, community, tradition, morals, singing, flowers, and fancy aloha vibes. All things church offered. Perhaps he did it for his love for the trees that made up the forest rather than the supposed over-seer of it all.

Surely because his mother and father were staunch Baptists, too. He was very close with his Ma. When he married John’s Mom in 1960, he readily left the Baptist faith and joined her Protestant one because they let him dance, and he loved to dance. So it does seem plausible that he valued being a part of a church more than any larger notions they adhered to.

He was very moral and kind. He was a good man… and a church man… but yes, it would not seem necessarily religious.

And he doesn’t want to be in the ground.

After his death, our grief took a lot of shapes. We ended up not revisiting the cemetery and put the whole conversation aside for when Mom would go. This kicking the buck down the road is another thing we didn’t talk about, so I assume it has an end with hers. A lack of communication as a form of coping is all too common in the Sanders family household. Our avoidance has felt palpable at times.

As my mother’s perhaps end nears yet again, I’ve chosen to act on our cemetery plot needs. As long as I have been waiting for her to be at peace, I am well aware that when indeed it happens, the grief will again be debilitating and clear decisions will be extraordinarily difficult to make. Now is the time to prepare for then.

The place we were looking at those many years ago is not it, and I’ve chosen to look elsewhere. The Valley of the Temples is a stunning place nestled in the Ko’olau mountain range, overlooking the sea. My mom loved it there. She and I actually hung out at cemeteries quite often. We enjoyed the stories we could imagine from clues left by the markers, the nature, the calm, taking photos.

She was likely agnostic, but I don’t know much beyond that. She would describe the Ko’olaus with such spiritual love, though. She heard someone describe them once as though it looked like God came down with her fingers and clawed their miraculous shape into being as though from clay. She loved that. She loved those mountains and grew up in their arms. I am far from home but can feel their hug as I look at Pat’s shared screen on my computer, and she describes the drive to the burial site.

I found the perfect place. The perfect plots. The perfect view. The right price.

I am stunned in the discovery of how freeing the mundane to-dos can be for grief.

I so look forward to sealing this deal and letting Mom know she has a place to go after all of this. A place we can visit in aloha without distress from construction and tourists.

Funerary rites and cemeteries are more for the living in actuality, but it is in these places I hope to find the peace of mind to visit my loved ones in spirit.

Hawai‘i has changed dramatically; no space left is sacred. Not unless deemed so by government, like a cemetery. I find peace knowing that a protected place to sit with them will be forever there. A place I can send potential future offspring, even. And their offspring. A place where the distractions and distress embedded in more familiar spaces are not, where I can find the quiet inner peace I long for to dedicate to them.

Aloha Nui loa,

Julia