Ash Plot
I’ve been watching writer John Green’s YouTube channel The Vlog Brothers, where he and his brother Hank post videos to each other. They’ve been doing this for seventeen years. One of John’s recent vlogs was about how nothing makes him a liar quite like the future. He says, ‘Hank, one of my many problems is that I always believe that present me and future me are the same person experiencing the same context, and so I’ll make big declarative statements about the future.’ He gives examples such as saying he would never join Twitter (which he did). Or after writing several bestselling novels he declared he was done with fiction but now, after writing two non-fiction books, he’s back to fiction again.
At the end of the video John says, ‘I should stop trying to predict the future, but I can’t.’ He wants to let the future be ‘unknowable,’ but he’s not confident he can let go of the illusion of control. The vlog made me think of a review of Tina Makereti’s essay collection This Compulsion In Us. Posted on the Māori Literature Blog, the review says Tina’s book ‘opens with a re-justification of the essay as a form’ that is full of ‘[p]aradoxes, conflicts, and contradictions.’ Reviewer Jordan Tricklebank saw this as ‘a response to writers who might use the essay form as a blunt tool to reduce complex issues to digestible “takes.”’
While I don’t think Jordan was referring to my work, I recognise myself in that description—the digestible takes. Like John, I’ve preferred the declarative statement to the complex and tangled. I like things to be neat and known. Life feels safer when I can see its working parts, or at least when I can convince myself I can. There are many reasons for this—a complicated childhood and neurodivergence are two that spring to mind—but whatever the reason, it’s an unhelpful quality. Safety is all well and good, but it doesn’t allow much room for happy chance or a disastrous mistake that blossoms into growth.
I didn’t know this about myself until I was shopping my last book around publishers. An editor I respect said they didn’t want to publish the book because, while having many good attributes (their email a careful compliment sandwich), my writing was ‘too restrained.’ In other words, my vulnerability was careful. My writing showed my discomfort with uncertainty—a fear of being mistaken and messy. I remember opening the email on a warm afternoon and the world lurched. It was devastating in the way that only true things can be. My restraint hadn’t been a conscious act: I could only write what I could see, and I could only see what I could handle. The editor had easily spotted what I hadn’t been able to articulate about myself. And isn’t that the way it usually happens? Someone else tells you.
*
I am thinking about uncertainty as I drive to Karori Cemetery to look at the Seaforth Memorial Garden. I’ve been emailing with Jordan the Customer Services Officer about the process of getting an ash plot for myself and my husband, Jim. While Karori reached capacity for burials in the 1950s, it still has ash plots for purchase. I’m only forty-seven but I’m an incurable forward planner, which I get from my mum. Last year I wrote a funeral plan as part of organising our wills, an abstract process done from the comfort of my house, but I’ve been putting off this final task.
Jordan’s sent me a map of the garden where the ash plots are located. The available plots are ‘marked with a blue pin drop,’ he tells me. The cemetery steps down the side of Johnson’s Hill, the lush bush reserve that I can see from our house. In the morning, I watch the sun spill over the dark oblong patches of pine plantation, the lighter swathes of whekī and native bush, the curved ridgeline. From our lounge window, I can see the crematorium across the valley with its round solemn window, and the oldest part of the cemetery where the heavy white and grey graves are sloped and distorted with the years.
The memorial garden with the ash plots is down a quiet side street. As I park the car I feel strange. My throat is tight. The sunlight’s too bright, and the trees are sharp-edged, as though someone has put a neon filter over the world. At the entrance, I open Jordan’s map. The memorial garden is trapezoid in shape with a wide path down the middle. Rectangular garden beds flare out from the path like spokes. The layout is straight and tidy. How clear our desire to order things. There are twenty-eight beds in total but only eight still have vacancies: 10 North to 17 North. A low fence runs along one side of the garden as though it’s important to put boundaries around grief.
I crunch my way down the path holding my phone and trying to find the right beds. I feel light and numb. There is a man sitting on the fence beside one of the plots. We don’t look at each other. I guess he’s here visiting someone, maybe a parent, and I feel like an imposter intruding on his grief. The garden beds are bordered in brick, which is where the granite memorial plaques are fixed. There are also blue tiles attached to the bricks that indicate a reserved plot. Some don’t have the tiles yet—just a purple dot spray painted on the brick. (I wonder if Jordan makes these, leaning down, pushing the nozzle.) How strange to be a dot, then a tile, then a plaque that one day someone will stare at. How confounding to one day be ash.
The information that Jordan sent said that the urns (up to two) are interred in the grass in front of the beds, rather than under the bricks. I was surprised—it means that people must stand on them all the time. They must step on the buried urns while walking their dog through the cemetery and down to the patchwork of sports fields along the valley. Later, I read that this is not only common but purposeful for ‘lawn cemeteries,’ and that the beds are spaced wide enough apart to allow for a ride on mower. I stick to the path and realise that if I crane my neck, I can see our house on the far hill—the orderly zigzag of our steps and the bushes that I’ve shaped to globes. How familiar and sure it looks, waiting for me. Then I realise that, by the time I’m here, it will no longer be mine.
I finally find 10 North to 17 North next to a power pylon. I suppose you take what you can get. I think about my son Sam standing here in some year I won’t see. Maybe it will be winter, like it is now, and the rose bushes that plant out each bed will also be sticks and thorns. The cold air chills my hands and cheeks. The sky is a dazzling blue. A white satellite of a gull drifts above me. I feel disconnected, as though I am here and somewhere else. I am suddenly reminded of childbirth—not the pain of it, but the way it felt primal and so momentous that out of necessity it became abstract. After walking around each bed, I decide on 10 North because it’s the furthest away from the pylon. I choose plot 14 next to Pamela Ballantyne who died in 2022, aged seventy-four. Her plaque says she was dearly loved. The internet tells me the word cemetery comes from the Ancient Greek ‘koimeterion’ which means ‘sleeping place.’ I hope she’s someone I can sleep next to.
What I like about the Vlog Brothers is that while John’s talking to Hank, he also seems to be talking to himself. He’s figuring out what he thinks in real time. I wonder how many of my conversations with friends—the walks through Ōtari Bush; the video calls bouncing across shining time zones—are also me talking to myself. I’m sure writing functions the same way, the hook of words pulling up strange and unsettling creatures from the deep. On the way back to the car, I message my best friend who is living in Switzerland. I send her a photo of the plot I’ve chosen. ‘You never know what will happen. I didn’t want Sam or Jim to deal with it,’ I text. Sometimes the truth of mortality is too much to hold. But then some days, I walk through a cemetery and imagine myself dead.
*
My son Sam and I are in Ōtautahi visiting my parents. We come down each year for Sam’s birthday. He’s just turned fourteen and stands in the driveway of my childhood home with my mother. He towers over her. I ask them to step back towards the fence with its evergreen hebes and cherry blossom tree so I can take a photo. She looks up at him, her hair soft around her face, a red woollen scarf at her throat. He has his hands in his pockets and is a little embarrassed. Smiling, he looks down, eyes closed.
My parents are taking Sam out for cake while I walk around Hagley Park. Dad comes down the back steps after locking the door and then rattles about in the garage for five minutes arranging the bins. In the garage gloom Dad looks tired, hunched. For the last ten days I’ve been getting over a virus. I’m achy and fatigued, but it’s nearly gone. Sam never got it, his young immune system doing its work. My parents are both in their early 80s, so mum and I talked about whether we should come. ‘I don’t want you to get it,’ I said. I don’t want to put you in hospital, I thought. I don’t want you to die because of me. But we decided I probably wasn’t contagious, and our visits are precious. There are only so many birthdays left together. Dad’s finished now and comes out into the sunlight dusting off their hands. The garage door clanks its slow descent.
When I reach Hagley Park I’m glad to be walking. The bare trees squiggle their branches against the sky. The fallen leaves are thick on the ground, orange and tacky with mud. Sunlight shines in shafts between the trunks, the shadows making a web on the grass. I walk the wide asphalt path that traces the outside of the park, past the golf course and rugby grounds, the netball courts where I played as a child (short blue scratchy skirt, frozen legs, wing defence). The park is full of people and memories. The sun is strong and warm.
I pass the looming hospital and cross the river. The lazy current swirls downstream as ducks feed in the shallows. Green and silver ripples roll out from their bodies as they dive under. A man comes towards me with three identical golden retrievers. He stops as I bend down to pat one, the dog butting its wet nose against my hand. We talk for a while about the clear weather, the chance of frost. I ask him about the dogs. ‘My daughter kept on buying them and then she left home,’ he explains before giving a shrug that says ‘the things we do for our kids.’ He gently pulls on the leads and steers the jostling dogs away.
On the face of it, buying an ash plot in my forties is the opposite of letting things be uncertain. It has the flavour of control freak and there’s some truth to that, but planning can also be an act of acceptance. My mum’s forward planning involves decluttering the house in anticipation of her death, which could be years away. Her own mother lived to ninety-two. I suppose at some point an awareness of mortality arrives and, like an unwelcome guest, refuses to leave. I’ve noticed that phone conversations with Mum often drift to her end of life. We repeat ourselves (a preparation). We talk about whether she wants to go into a home, and what she wants if she gets dementia. We talk about the kind of funeral she’d like (‘we don’t like a fuss in our family’). These conversations end with some version of ‘not that we have to think about that now’ and ‘but that will be a long way off,’ soothing the tension away. But we are thinking. It could be soon.
Crossing another bridge, I enter the broad expanse of North Hagley Park. The grass is thick and green, and the intersecting pathways have neatly cut edges. I take the shady gravel path down by the river. The willows, bare after dropping their leaves, lean towards the water. The maritime pines surge upwards—enormous, colonial signposts; deeply rooted with their red ridged trunks. I’m tired now, but I’m nearly at the car and then back to a warm house with people I love.
Having a plot does feel old fashioned. Most people these days are tipped onto the wind to be carried away. It’s a good ending to melt into the sky. But I can cite sound and sensible reasons why I want to be in the ground. I want to rest beside my husband. It’s less work for my loved ones after I die. It is part of my Pākehā narrative of what it means to commemorate a life; a belief system played out in dirt and bricks and roses. It feels neat and known. But driving home from the park another reason comes to me, fished from the deep. While I don’t believe in an afterlife, I do believe that love leaves an imprint. That memory and imagination allow us a kind of time travel. When I stood beside the ash plot, I imagined Sam standing there too. He’s on the grass, and I’m in the earth. His beard is shot with grey like his father’s. He looks out to the house that he grew up in—that we live in now—that some part of us will always live in, even when the house itself has gone. Even when we all are gone. He finds me there, and he is comforted.
I can feel this future version of him in the same way I sometimes catch the long-gone scent of his milky baby skin or hear echoes of his child’s singing voice. It reminds me of when I get in the car and after turning the key, the radio starts playing the reverberating base of ‘Seven Nation Army.’ I know he’s out there somewhere using my Spotify account. He’s on a bus coming home from school, the windows fogged with the passengers’ breath, the city a blur outside, and for that moment, the music connects us.
*
When I get back to my parents’ everyone’s in the lounge watching the Tour de France. It’s stage six from Bayeux to Vire Normandie which, I’m told, involves two hundred kilometres of hill racing. On the flatscreen TV the French countryside rushes past in a blur of green and grey, and crowds of people wave flags from behind the barriers. Irish rider Ben Healy has made a break for it, and he’s holding the lead. His pink-shirted torso floats from side to side as he stands on his pedals and body braced, he pumps his bike up the hill.
‘There’s five hundred metres to go,’ says Dad, who’s tense and upright and sitting next to Mum who’s got her glasses on. An abandoned sudoku sits on the padded knee tray in her lap. ‘He’ll only be the seventh Irishman ever to win a stage,’ Mum says. Sam’s on the other couch, leaning forward, his long legs jutting into the room. His feet jiggle from side to side as though mimicking Healy’s pace. He’s urgent and unselfconscious, and I remember how electrifying it is to be young. He starts to tell me facts about the Tour—the teams, the yellow jersey, stats about the bikes. They’re all on Healy’s side, the Irish underdog. I sit down with them for the final climb.
Maybe Sam will never visit the ash plot. Maybe we will drift apart after he leaves home. He could develop a problem with alcohol or be killed in an accident or move overseas, or in a few years the world might burn us all to ash. Even though the signs were there, it took me time to realise that the ‘childhood’ part of having a child was painfully short. That really I was having an adult, and one who will hopefully spend half their life without me. No one warned me that I would also be that adult preparing to be without her parents.
Healy is close now, the crowds beating their hands on the barriers and cheering, the pace car right at his back. His face contorts, wet with sweat as he glances over his shoulder. The finish line is coming. Head bent, his body strains to be done with the task. I wonder how he makes sense of it—all the work for this one fleeting day. How does he know when to put it all on the line? I can’t help but try to understand, to find instruction in the moment. I put my arm around Sam’s shoulder. My mother’s hand holds the sudoku book flat on her lap. My father stands. Together, we watch the cyclist grind and push up the hill to the end.
Notes
John Green’s video ‘My Lies’ can be watched on YouTube.
Jordan Tricklebank’s review can be read on Māori Literature Blog.
Dr Sarah Jane Barnett is an Aotearoa writer, editor and creative writing teacher. Her poetry, essays and reviews have been published widely in Aotearoa, as well as in Australia and the United States. Her poems often inhabit the lives of others and ask how we find connection and live life after trauma. Her essays explore the multifaceted theme of modern womanhood. Her most recent book, Notes on Womanhood, was published in 2022. You can find her at sarahjanebarnett.net.