The Ashes

Baseball is, and now always will be, my mother’s ashes.

She died in March of 2019, lonely in a hospital bed in Victoria, British Columbia. Through the previous fall and winter, I had travelled to be with her and my father several times after a stroke rendered her seriously ill. Their shared living room was a place of endless bickering and everyday troubles. Those visits were full of departure lounges, hospital rooms, filling out taxes returns, trying to divine scrawled computer passwords, and dealing with my two competing brothers. Those visits had been so dominated by multiple small tasks that I had not allowed time for emotion, except for one moment when she was wheeled out of intensive care looking like she’d been hit by a truck.

The hospital’s houseman called me just after 4:00 a.m. Eastern Time on March 7. He was quiet and solicitous, a calming voice from two thousand miles and three time zones away. I sat on the edge of my bed with my head in my hands, the universal human posture of grief and defeat. I had to teach a seminar the next day, which I barely remember, and then drove straight to the airport. The next days and weeks would bring me all the usual things. My brothers and their families were on vacation in Hawaii, my father is sight-impaired and adept at the learned helplessness so frequent in men of his vintage. In his prime he could navigate four-engine naval patrol planes across oceans. Now he could not even tell me where to find my mother’s passport so she could be declared legally dead and released from the hospital’s morgue.

I was surprised to learn that, despite her fervent Roman Catholicism, my mother had willed that she be cremated. For all the years of my youth I had repeated the words of the church’s Apostle’s Creed, which indicated that, among other things, I believed in the resurrection of the soul and the body. I’m a philosopher, not a theologian. Maybe you can resurrect ashes into a complete heaven-sent body? I don’t know.

I have no doubts about my mother’s soul, but what makes the body part harder is that we chose to scatter those ashes in different places that were meaningful to her. Some went into the ocean water along the harbor walk near my parents’ house. After the somewhat surreal scene of having the box of them queried at airport security, I took some to Jackson’s Point on Lake Simcoe, north of Toronto, where my parents had met as love struck youngsters at a summer camp. My father was then a monk, one of the Christian Brothers who ran the camp employed as lifeguard and swimming instructor. He was tall and good-looking, with a flashing movie-star smile. My mother was a high school girl working in the kitchen. My wife and I sent some of the ashes swirling into the lake water one autumn afternoon with a chunk of Ecclesiastes as benediction.

My father left the monastic order—obviously, or you wouldn’t be reading this—and when they were married a few months later, glamour shots of their wedding appeared in all the Toronto newspapers. They were indeed a handsome young couple, the world theirs to take. The Royal Canadian Air Force offered him its own kind of glamour, plus the hierarchy and order they both craved. The next quarter century of service took them, and us, to a new base every two or three years, across the country and back.

I loved this transient life, but it offered few of the usual anchors of childhood. Baseball was always one. My father taught me how to fill out a score sheet, explained the frequently Byzantine rules of the game, with their delicate checks and balances, and indulged in the inevitable games of backyard catch. It wasn’t until much later that I realize that my mother was a lifelong fan of the game, too. She never talked about it much, and didn’t like watching...