Goines On: Ashes with ashes

Click image for more vignettes

When Goines learned of a friend’s loss of his beloved dog, and of the friend’s burying his dog’s remains in his back yard – the dog’s “Forever kingdom” – Goines’ thoughts returned to an action he and his wife had taken a couple of years earlier, less than a month after the loss of their own dog, Ziggy.
    On April 4, 2019, they visited Memorial Grove on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill, where they had decided to have their ashes strewn when the time came.
    Goines loved Memorial Grove’s location: across Country Club Road from the entrance to ghoulish Gimghoul Road and the Forest Theatre adjoining Battle Park, where he had walked many times, alone or with friends. Across Paul Green Drive from the Playmakers Theatre and adjacent to the campus cemetery, with its traditional gravesites. And across South Road from the School of Government, where that first UNC President he had worked for held a professorship.
    After their visit, back home, the Goineses downloaded and completed reservations to have their plaques affixed to the Grove’s Memorial Wall, and they wrote and mailed checks for them – $100 (of the $350 fee) each, setting aside the $500 balance for their children to provide “when the time came.”

When the Goineses notified their son and daughter of the reservations, they told them that they would like for their ashes to be strewn in the Grove at the same time. Whichever of the Goineses survived the other would store the departed’s ashes until such time as he or she, too, was collected by the cremation society.
    Their son or daughter would retrieve the latest ashes, locate the earlier one’s, and make an appointment to strew both their ashes on the same day, to ensure that both their names would be engraved on the same plaque on the Wall of Memories.
    And then, on the appointed day, their son’s and daughter’s arms would wave good-bye to the Goineses in the strewing of their ashes, letting them intermingle as they trailed to the floor of the Grove.

But the friend’s loss raised the question, what about Ziggy and Walter’s ashes? When Ziggy departed two years earlier, Goines had set his box of ashes alongside Walter’s on the top of the mirrored cabinet in Goines’ office, where Walter’s ashes had been a quiet presence for ten years.
    The Goineses had discussed strewing Walter’s and Ziggy’s ashes in the back yard, where Walter had played for the final months of his life and Ziggy for all the months of his. But Goines now felt a terrible yearning for Walter’s and Ziggy’s ashes to be strewn along with his and Mrs. Goines’ in Memorial Grove. Were pets’ ashes permitted?
    He did a bit more research, looking further than the finding that spouses were allowed, whether or not they had studied, taught, or served there.
    A friend of Goines’ told him about an ode to Memorial Grove that an English professor had posted a few days after it was dedicated (in October 2005). In a key passage, Goines noted, the professor had included the word “family”:

Now, here in this small woods at the eastern edge of Chapel Hill, we gather on a new ground where departed Tar Heels may be interred and where we may return in remembrance of them. Whether in life they were students, faculty, staff or family, those who hallow this ground will all in some way have been joined in the great, moving and joyful purpose of the University.

    “Well, then!” Goines uttered aloud. Walter & Ziggy hadn’t studied, taught, or served at UNC any more than Mrs. Goines had, but they too were family.
    And who needed to be told, anyway, if the Goineses’ son and daughter brought all four of their boxes to Memorial Grove…when the time came?

Copyright © 2021 by Moristotle