Laura Gansel is a retired school employee who lives on a small farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. She is a charter member of the Corvallis Secular Society.
In July 2004, my husband Chuck and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Our four daughters and their families joined us at the Glacier National Park hotel, where Chuck and I first met. It was one of the happiest times of our lives. Four months later, we experienced one of the saddest when Chuck died. We were then faced with another kind of life event to observe.
We are all longtime humanists, but the humanism we knew at that time offered few prescribed rites for this type of loss. We felt we had to find our own way.
Chuck’s final illness came on quickly. I never got to ask him what he wanted done after his death. The time never seemed right—you know how that goes. Afterward, I had time to think about it on my own. After the tears had been shed and those first awful moments of sorrow were endured, the girls and I sat down around the dining table. I told them what I wanted and said that if there was anything about my choices they couldn’t agree to, we would talk about it and reach a decision acceptable to all. As it was, there was general agreement with everything I had thought out. That unanimity helped sustain us through the days to come. An unspoken secondary benefit: I was letting my children know what I wanted done after I died.
There would not be a funeral, for several reasons in addition to our general dislike of them. We lived too far from family and had no church affiliation or other social connection that might have made formal rites seem necessary. I am so glad I live in secular Oregon, where there is tolerance for a wide range of observances of death. Here we did not have to face criticism or confrontations or have to insist that our wishes be carried out. It was as we wanted it. There was no ceremony. The remains were cremated without embalming and without a casket. I took the ashes home with me and put them away in a quiet spot.
One thing we did plan from the start was to scatter Chuck’s ashes on the family farm in Wisconsin, where he had grown up—a very special place for us both. When summer came, we went to Wisconsin.
Of course, nothing is that simple. Chuck’s sister lives on the farm. She is a mainstay of the local Methodist church, very much tuned in to the expectations and conventions of this little town and to the rest of the family there. So what we had hoped would be a simple, small, close family affair became a full-blown memorial very much like a church service. The sister is very good at arranging such things, and we just let her go ahead and do it (although she did consult with us). I’ve always felt that funerals and memorial rites are for the living, not the dead who are beyond caring. Other people loved Chuck, too, and if they needed some religious rite to feel that proper grieving had been done, I wouldn’t tell them they couldn’t have it. My niece, a Methodist minister, came up from Texas to do the service. Fortunately, she understood our feelings and found ways to conduct it with our values in mind, while still following the proper Methodist customs.
I did insist that only the very closest family be present when we went into the woods to scatter the ashes. That would be a private and final moment, hard for all of us. We didn’t want a crowd struggling across the fields out to the woods and then expecting some sort of ceremony. I put the box of ashes in my backpack and carried Chuck out to his final rest. Our small group stood in a circle. I asked if anyone wanted to share in the scattering. No one did, so I did it alone. We didn’t say a lot, but I told my girls that this hill was now our place forever. Then we left Chuck there; it was hard, but we know he will live on through the trees and grass and flowers that grow in the woods where he loved to be. That’s the only immortality any of us will ever really have, but it’s enough.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
Renew your FREE INQUIRY subscription