My husband had a horror of being buried. He wanted to be cremated and his ashes spread on Jeffries Ledge off the coast of New Hampshire. So I had him cremated and we got the ashes back about 5 days later. They came in a large black plastic box.
The trip to spread the ashes is scheduled for June 18, 2021 out of Eastman’s in Seabrook, NH. That was a long time away.
I figure it probably pissed him off but I took 1 cup of ashes out of the box and put them in his lion box. He had this box for decades holding his little treasures.
When we moved his bedroom, I knew the lid had ended up in a different box than the top, not sure why. I figured they were both buried in the storage unit. But when I was going through some of his boxes here at the house I found both, in different boxes.
They were both quite tarnished and rusted so I polished them up. I will probably have to do this frequently.
When his best friend Ted died over a decade ago, he took some of the ashes. They have been in the little box on our kitchen table ever since. Well, most of them. He put some in a fishing rod so he could still take Ted fishing with him. He claimed he seldom caught anything on the rod; that Ted was still messing with him.
So now he and Ted sit together on the kitchen table.
But that black box was not David and I wanted to do something with it to make it him. I decided making a cardboard sleeve for it and putting photos of him on it would work.
The next time my intern was here, we picked photos and fit them onto the sleeve.
This was the front. He and I dressed for a night out, one of his big fish, him and his cows, and him and our son at the fair, our anniversary each year.
One side had him holding Lily, one of the barn cats. The bottom was the wrap around of the header to his Facebook page.
The back had him eating ice cream, one of his main food groups. The top is him holding a day old chick. The lower left was his birthday in 2020 and the lower right while he was building the addition. This last was one of his favorite photos.
The last side has our old cat, Bryde, taking a nap on his bed with him. The house he built nearly by himself over the years and was so proud of. And him with the best pair of pigs we ever raised.
It’s been on the box now for nearly a month, sitting on the kitchen island in the thick of things. I was getting worried something would spill on the sleeve and ruin it, so I’ve decided to laminate it and put it back on the box. That will protect it.
Once the ashes are spread I plan to frame the sleeve. It’s a nice collation of the things he loved.