New Year Thoughts: Ashes in a Cedar Box

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’m thinking about life. I’m thinking about joy and suffering. I’m thinking about ways to explain my thoughts. Let’s work our way back to that.

I made a box from cedar for my mother-in-law’s ashes.

This will require some back story, so warm-up your coffee.

Here goes.

Next year is 2025. It has been a quarter of a bleeping century since the year 2000. It has been five years since 2020.

In late December of 2019, we were innocent of COVID-19. We had the dumpster-fire year of 2020 ahead of us. We didn’t know.

We just didn’t know.

Lock-down in March. Working from home. Working in our yards. Door-Dashing from restaurants.

We were always hoping it would just burn itself out, that it would just be over. Finally, we only have embers burning in odd corners, but that’s long after 2020.

Then we came to Christmas of that year. We took our lives in our hands and got together. It was a nice day. 

The next day--in separate events--a friend of mine passed-away from COVID, but before that my mother-in-law fell ill.

Seriously ill.

Because of the lockdown we couldn’t see her, couldn’t be with her.

That was the beginning of a 4-month waking-nightmare that ended with my mother-in-law’s death on May 1, 2021.  

We brought her home in January, so at least we had time with her, but that period marked everyone in the family, from oldest to youngest in a way that is still very present.

Each of us began to change in response to that event, to the interconnected events that occurred during the various dumpster fires associated with COVID. (“Dumpster fire” became part of my working idiom, for one thing.)

I took up wood-working in late 2021 and since then I’ve acquired some nice tools; have built up a nice shop; and have learned how to do hand-tool woodworking to a certain degree.

At some point I acquired a bit of rough-cut, locally-grown cedar.  Then this summer, the summer of 2024, I decided that I would make a box to put my mother-in-law’s ashes in. 

I measured the box the ashes are currently in. I cut and glued up some panels from the rough-cut cedar.

Then I just let them sit.  I had in my head what I wanted to do, but I just could not proceed. The wood panels just laid around my shop taking up space because I could not proceed.

Then Jean and I went to Scotland on a walking tour. This is something we just wouldn’t have done before. There was always time to do it later.

Then I went to Paraguay.

When I got back, Jean and I started talking about vacation for next year, and she said it was time to take Janet’s ashes to the family plot in Indiana.

I began squaring-up the wood for the cedar box right away, and within a week the box was done.

It is beautiful beyond my vision for it. 

It’s not perfect. If it were perfect, then it couldn’t’ve been made by me.

But it is beautiful.

Jean looked at it and said that we’re not burying it in her family’s plot in Indiana. We will keep it here and put some of her mom’s memorabilia in it. We will bury her ashes in something else.

Suffering is a part of life. Maybe we’re supposed to get something out of it; maybe not. It doesn’t matter because the suffering is just there.

You do what you can in response; it’s never enough; but maybe it’s better than not doing anything at all.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.