Why I waited 10 years to spread my dad’s ashes

It was a crisp October day when the world ended, the kind where you can wear just a jumper, so I didn’t have a coat on when the sky shattered and fell down around me. 

Today, 29th October 2023, is 10 years since my university house doorway became the backdrop of my most tragic scene as I was delivered the cruellest news. ‘They didn’t want to tell you over the phone’, my aunt said, and with that sentence I knew immediately what she was going to say next. 

My dad had passed away. 

I had spoken to him the evening before, before he went to bed. I had seen him two days before, and he was completely fine. Nothing could have prepared me for the fact that instead of going to my 10am lecture that day and carrying on as usual, my life as I knew it was thrust into some parallel universe where people’s worst fears casually come true.

But I had texted him that morning and he hadn’t responded. So I tried to ring him, and he hadn’t picked up. This had never happened before, so I think in that moment I already knew something was wrong, but I just didn’t want to believe it.

I was 19, having just started my second year of university, and my brother was only 14. It was his half term and dad hadn’t woken him up for sleeping in late like usual, so he went into his bedroom and was surprised to find that dad looked like he was still asleep. He tried to wake him. But he couldn’t. He sat alone in that house with my dad’s dead body, sending my mom a flurry of desperate texts to come over and help him. My mom told my auntie, who lived nearby, that my dad had passed away during the night, and for her to come and get me.

I remember texting my friend that I usually walked to lectures with: ‘I’m not coming today, my dad has died’. Then I packed a suitcase with numb fingers, not knowing what I would need to take or how long I would be gone. The drive home was both far too quick and everlasting; I didn’t want to have to deal with what would happen when we got there. 

Then I heard the worst words I have ever heard in the English language; ‘I’m sorry about your dad’. It made it real.

When you’re living in a grief vacuum, time doesn’t follow the usual rules. It would slow down to an excruciatingly miniscule pace as I lay in bed each day, before speeding up to the day of the funeral which arrived far before I could even accept that it was happening. It all felt so surreal. 

I spent one last day at the house my dad rented by myself, sitting on his reclining chair in the lounge, imagining the weight and the warmth of him sitting there just a few weeks ago. But there was nothing but cold and silence and the staleness of a house without breaths. Then I left, moved in with my mom and her boyfriend, and didn’t see that house again except in my dreams.

After the funeral, my dad’s ashes were split - me, my younger brother, and my older half sister each got a little bit in an individual urn. She took some more to bury in a plot so that she and her daughters would have a place to visit their grandad. And I kept the rest under my bed, where they would stay for the next 10 years, going with me from house to house. 

And I know that must sound really weird, honestly I do, but how was I supposed to decide what to do with my dad’s ashes when I couldn’t even process that he was really gone?

We were also so young at the time, and it was not fair for us to decide what to do with his ashes when we had so much else going on. I wanted my brother to be older, to be in on the decision together. I was also just in denial. I also just wanted him close. In a way, that meant he was still there, in the room with me. And isn’t that where he would want to be?

And it was a fine arrangement, until I started having the dreams. I had an almost identical recurring dream, over and over, with just minute differences. The premise was always that dad was still alive, but we hadn’t seen him or spoken to him for years. He was still in that house, being forgotten about, and I would go there to desperately search for him. It was so vivid, standing there in the house, that I could feel the creak of the floorboards in the dining room under my feet, all these years later.

Then I would wake up and realise he wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t; he was dead. I would come to this conclusion in panic attacks, gasping for air, tears streaming down my face.

That’s what people don’t realise; people don’t just die once, they die over and over again.

He dies in my recurring nightmares, on every special occasion, every October 29th, every time I see a middle-aged man with glasses in the supermarket that I could mistake for him, every time I pick up the phone and it isn’t him calling. 

Even 10 years later, I feel like I’m still stuck there emotionally. So much has happened but I haven’t really processed it, I’m still the same girl who broke down at her university door, who found a piece of paper a few weeks ago with a spaghetti bolognese recipe scrawled on it in his handwriting and sobbed on the floor of a storage unit.

When I think about it for too long my throat starts to swell until I can’t swallow or breathe, and my eyes stream as I fight for air. But sometimes I wish it would close all together and my lungs would fill with the cement of my grief until I choke on it.

Usually people spread ashes soon after a death, or on the first anniversary. But it can take people a while to have closure and it’s fine if you don’t know what you want to do right away, there’s no rush and it’s something you should be allowed to work out at your own pace.

I’m here to tell you that it’s okay if you’re not ready. No one can tell you how long or in what way you should grieve. 

I wasn’t ready for a decade, because death and grief is something that’s incredibly hard to process and you are allowed to take as much time as you need.

I thought that maybe the dreams were my dad’s way of telling me that he was ready to move on from under the bed, to be celebrated and remembered. I didn’t want him to think that we were forgetting about him. 

So my brother and I went to Glasgow, my dad’s birth city, to set his ashes free from their confinement, to take him on a trip with us to see a part of the world that he hadn’t visited in a long time.

In all honesty, I still don’t know if I was ready, and rather than it being just a huge sense of relief I also felt an immense mixture of sadness that we had taken him with us and had returned home without him. How would he feel about us leaving him there?

Spreading my dad’s ashes is one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do. But I also felt like it was something that I really needed to confront. And to do it with my brother means that we were able to create special memories to overshadow such a terrible day.

Though it hasn’t brought complete closure and acceptance, I haven’t had one of my recurring dreams in the weeks since, so I like to think he’s at peace.

Written by Ally McLaren
Editor

Hi, I’m Ally, Editor of This Modern Struggle Magazine.

You may have seen my writing in Mouthy Magazine or Darling Magazine. I currently work in Marketing and PR and do freelance copywriting on the side. I also have experience in journalism and feature writing for women’s magazines and national press.

When I’m not writing you can find me eating pizza, stroking my cat and watching true crime documentaries.

I started this magazine for all the fellow strugglers who feel the same way that I do; like everyone else has it all figured out and you just don’t know what you’re doing in life.