Mum wanted to be cremated when she died. I felt like that was a good choice. From a practical and ethical standpoint, cremation seemed like a better option than burial. But that’s not really why I supported Mum’s decision. 

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I’ve always been more of a romantic than a realist. To me, the appeal of cremation is in having your ashes scattered where you’d like to spend eternity – your very own heaven on earth. And, back then, I liked the idea of commemoration, having a loved one close by, in a beautiful urn on a prominent mantlepiece, watching over you, proudly. 

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The thing about urns, however, is that you have to buy them. Ashes don’t come direct from the crematorium in a pretty vase. Glamour comes at a cost. We received Mum’s remains in an oblong box made of white plastic. On top, her name was written in black sharpie, along with a serial number: 32569C.

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At that time I was 17, and I had a lot of ideas about death. When someone close to you died, you needed to be really sad, mournful and also very, very respectful. I wanted to have Mum with me all the time, I told myself, feeling as though that’s what an adoring child should want. Yet Mum left strict instructions. She wanted to be scattered into Pittwater, the estuary where her beloved sailing boat was moored. 

 

This left me in a bit of a dilemma, but not one my precocious teenaged mind couldn’t solve. I decided to split the ashes up into thirds: a third for me, one for my little brother Sebastian and one to be scattered from the side of Sheer Magic.

 

I gave Seb his portion of Mum in a biscuit tin.

 

He could source a more appropriate urn himself and the tin was nicer than my white, plastic oblong anyway. The two of us had a ceremony on Sheer Magic, about a fortnight after Mum’s funeral. The ocean was calm and murky, reflecting the overcast sky as I poured her ashes into the water. Then we sat there, heads bowed in silence, waiting for a respectful amount of time to pass. Seb was only 6 and didn’t really approach the moment as pensively as I would’ve liked. He got distracted from being sombre and started playing with the sail pulleys and cables when he should’ve been thinking about Mum and how sad it was that she was gone. I didn’t tell him off; he was only 6 and had enough to deal with, and an urn to source on top of that. Nonetheless, between Seb’s fiddling and my insistence on perfection, I felt like the moment was lacking as we pulled away in the tinnie, back to dry land and the real world. I still had my share of the ashes, though. And I would do something truly special with them, I said to myself.

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