From ALL THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE
Fortunately, it did not take an act of congress to claim my own body parts. It was actually catalogued properly. There was a minor bureaucracy. That was all. It only took one man who still cared and did the right thing.
“I can’t just hand them to you. I have to mail them to a funeral home,” the man said. “Do you have one in particular?”
“The closest one to this base,” I said.
After a few days, I received a call from the funeral home. They asked me how I would like to dispose of the remains. It sounded so detached to address my own body parts as “the remains.”
“I want them cremated and I want to watch the cremation.”
“I don’t think-“
“Closure. I need closure. Please let me watch myself burn and turn to ash.”
Two days later we drove north I-5 to Delaware.
A part of me is now reduced to a biohazard, a pathologic specimen. They are non-functional extremities, brought to shreds by bullets. And so here I am, alone with you, my friends, in a sacred ground of concrete and steel and pipes with methane to watch the burning of my flesh and bones. I wheeled myself closer to the crematory and I placed the box with my legs and left arm inside. I opened the box, felt you, my legs and arm, inside the red biohazard plastic bag.
You are cold, cold as the meat in a grocery store. I did not open the red bag that wrapped you but I did shed my tears for you. I mourned your death. I mourned the remainder of my life.
The man closed the door. Clunk.
The fire started like a grill ready for a barbecue. The yellow flames turn blue and angry, roaring, devouring first the box that curled into thin films of ash then the plastic, melting into itself, and then my flesh searing, sizzling, fat boiling. The bones showed a glimpse of red fury before, in what seemed like an instant in time, I turned into ash before my eyes.
The man put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I’ll call you in three days. What kind of urn would you like it in?”
“A screw top.”
There is no more memory in those bones and flesh that have turned into ash. The remainder of me still holds the sequences of my past. I rolled away from the fire that devoured me, toward the door, turning left, then right, searching for the light and air. I was pounding inside, the rhythm and beat loud as they traveled though my flesh. I turned and turned the wheels of my wheelchair to my car where Julie and Gretchen were waiting.
“Are you okay,” Julie asked.
I moved to the passenger side and finally said, “Yes.”
She got out of the driver’s side and walked around. As she folded the wheelchair, I said, “It’ll be about three days before I can pick up my ashes.”
PC Donan 