A Place for My Father’s Ashes

After her dad slowly perished from Alzheimer’s disease, a daughter writes of loss, grief — and release — via the dispersal of his remains

Cindy Schweich Handler,

AARP

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Published December 31, 2024

Digital art silhouette of a human figure with a vibrant dispersion of red and green leaves

Lehel Kovacs

My husband and I had been traveling heavy since leaving our New Jersey home to kayak across the lakes of the upper Midwest last June. Harry and I had crammed our Subaru with luggage, life preservers, oars, snacks and a five-cup Mr. Coffee. Our boats were strapped to the roof. In the wayback, a 4-pound box was cushioned in towels. It contained my father’s ashes.

This last was a late addition to our packing list. The rest served the trip’s original purpose of celebrating Harry’s and my recent retirements. Harry thought it would be memorable to launch this next chapter with a two-week adventure promising big skies, fresh water lakes, local brewpubs and omnipresent whitefish.

A few months before we hit the road, my 91-year-old father had died. It was a painful loss, though not unexpected. My mother, two younger sisters and I had been losing him to Alzheimer’s disease for years. On every visit back to St. Louis, where he’d spent all but a few years of his life, it was apparent how much more diminished he’d become.

In the early stage of memory loss, my naturally sharp dad started repeating a “greatest hits” lineup of anecdotes, such as how he learned to fly a small plane with a trainer who hid his epilepsy. He conflated childhood memories with adult experiences, asking if I remembered Terry, his cherished terrier who died decades before I was born. He feared change and was as firmly stuck in place as the evergreens he’d planted in the backyard, though the house was ill-equipped for a frail elderly man who wouldn’t let anyone but his wife touch him.

As his 24/7 aide, my mother was awake whenever he was, usually on kitchen or bathroom duty, at the mercy of his mercurial emotions. If she ventured out of his sight for more than a couple minutes to chat with a visitor, he called frantically for her return.

I was sometimes one of those visitors whom he viewed, in his illness-altered perspective, as competing for his wife’s attention. My mother and I were talking in the kitchen once when my dad wandered in and demanded that she watch an old movie with him. “Hank, your daughter’s here,” my mom countered gently. “Why don’t you keep us company?” He still recognized me, but it didn’t matter. He gave her a long, suspicious side eye, then trudged back to the comforts of black-and-white Danny Kaye. I knew, of course, that this was not the warm and mischievous family man who, while on a business trip to New York, treated me to two Broadway shows in one day. That version of my father would have been mortified to witness the hell this new version made my mother endure. I understood all that, yet losing the father-daughter bond still hurt.

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A year before he died, my dad fell at home, never walked again, and my mother had to place him in a memory care facility. He was medicated and unconscious more often than not, but when he wasn’t he railed relentlessly against the relocation and his fate. On a visit two weeks before he died, I told my mother I couldn’t bear to watch him suffer anymore. The painful memories were crowding out the happy ones, and making them harder to recall.

He took his last breath surrounded by my mother and sisters and their spouses, but Harry and I weren’t there. Though I didn’t regret missing his last moments—he’d stopped registering my presence months earlier—I was sorry I wasn’t there to support my grieving family. To make amends, I offered to do something everyone else was too exhausted to manage: take responsibility for his ashes. My mother chose where they were to be spread: Ephraim, Wisconsin, where my dad had loved to go sailing during family vacations in Door County.

Harry and I were grateful that a stay there fit neatly into our kayaking itinerary.

Four days into our trip, on a late June afternoon, my family gathered at a dock on Ephraim Bay. My mother, sisters and brothers-in-law are not kayakers, and that’s OK, because their role there was to recline on outdoor chaises by the water and bear witness. The waves gave minimal resistance to our paddles as Harry and I pushed off, and we moved beyond the swimmers, paddle-boarders and fishermen to a distant spot dappled in dancing sunlight. There, Harry produced the large clear bag full of powdery gray dust.

The plan had been for Harry to upend it into the water while I watched, but two factors made me change my mind. First, the wind was blowing in my direction, and there was a chance we’d reenact the scene in The Big Lebowski where Donny’s released ashes fly into the Dude’s face (I’d be playing Jeff Bridges). Second, I felt the burial could confer an element of closure. I was suddenly possessed of a strong desire to be the last person in contact with my father’s remains.

This is the place that brought out his life-loving nature, and as I looked around, the good times came flooding back. It’s where he never gave up on teaching my sister and me how to sail, even though we were slow and the boom bonked us on the head every time the boat tacked. Door County is where he took my two sons out on a fishing boat, and they returned hours later with a giant salmon and three goofy grins. Along the shore, I could make out the soda pop shop where he bought us kids ice cream cones, then tapped us on the shoulder and pretended to take bites out of them when we looked the other way. I pictured him smiling and in his element. His presence surrounded us.

Harry passed me the bag, I turned it over the side of the kayak, and the ashes slid effortlessly into the cool, playful waters, almost as if they recognized they were home. For a few moments, I sat in the stillness and appreciated how a trip to the past can help a person move forward. We would toast his memory later. For now, we turned around and kayaked back to the family he created.

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Freelance writer and editor Cindy Handler, 67, recently retired as an editor of and frequent contributor to The Record/Northjersey.com. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Redbook, Parenting, Newsweek and other publications.

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