My mother is in a Ziploc bag on my lap, wedged between a half-eaten bag of trail mix and my purse.
My stomach is queasy from the switchbacks up to Yosemite, where I’ve come to spread her ashes, and I’m having an existential crisis.
I had imagined this day as a beautiful send-off that would feel profound. Instead, it was all improvisation: a plastic bag, a last-minute decision, and ginger chews to stop me from being carsick.
I thought my 20s would be about kissing the wrong people in Los Angeles bars, not reading paperbacks on a hospital cot while my mom underwent her fifth brain surgery. My friends were off at college, debating sororities and semesters abroad; I was learning an entirely different set of skills.
At 21, I learned my mom had glioblastoma, a deadly brain cancer. Soon I was in the Bakersfield law library, Googling how to become my 16-year-old brother’s legal guardian, and learning that the same charm I used to snag me a table at Nobu could also get my mom a better room at Cedars-Sinai hospital. She ended up in the room Elizabeth Taylor had died in a few weeks earlier, a detail she loved to regale her friends with.
I don’t remember much from that last month of her life. I mostly just remember the goop I wiped from her eyes as she settled into her final nap. The home hospice nurse told my brother and me to give our mother “permission” to let go. Her fragile body was still fighting, and the nurse believed she was holding on for us. So through our snot and tears, we told her to go. But secretly, in every paused breath, I hoped she wouldn’t.
She passed away within eight months of her initial diagnosis. She was 44 years old.
When the paramedics arrived, I left the room. A white sheet over her body would finalize things in a way I wasn’t ready for yet. Eventually, in the middle of everything else, I had to figure out what to do with her body.
Then there was the price tag. A typical funeral with a viewing and burial in the US costs $8,300. Even cremation now costs more than $2,200 – an unthinkable sum for me at the time. I was a senior airman in the US air force, making about $2,200 a month.
When you can’t afford to pay, you end up grieving illegally – as I did.
My mom had asked to be cremated. Because my family and I were “sharing” her remains, we needed a way to divide her across multiple people: me, my brother and my aunt.
The cheapest option the funeral home offered was a maroon plastic box. I bought one, brought her home, and we portioned her into plastic bags.
Later, my aunt took me to a boutique and helped me pick out little wooden boxes for each of us. Small carved wooden things, prettier than what the funeral home had offered – and cheaper. It felt like a repair. It also didn’t quite work. The box had seams, and my mother kept slipping out of the cracks, a thin layer of her showing up on shelves and dressers and inside drawers.
When it came time to drive to Yosemite, I put her back in a plastic bag.
One thing I didn’t know was that scattering human remains in a national park requires a special use permit. That seems obvious now, but when you’re grieving, reading any fine print is a big undertaking.
The industry of dying wasn’t always so onerous. Before the civil war, most Americans died at home and were prepared for burial by their own families. Embalming became widespread only after the war, when battlefield deaths created a mass market for preserving bodies long enough to ship them north.
What followed was tradition making way for a business model: the funeral home, the professional embalmer, the licensed director, the sealed casket, the manicured lawn cemetery.
One factor pushing the industry toward higher prices is consolidation. Over the last two decades, large death-care conglomerates have absorbed independent funeral homes, in some markets amassing enough pricing power to draw federal antitrust action. What used to be a family business is, increasingly, a subsidiary.
None of this happened by accident, and it is not, as the industry sometimes claims, a response to what families want. Justin Crowe, the founder of Parting Stone, a Santa Fe company that turns cremated remains into solidified stones, told me that the shift from burial to cremation went from 5% in 1970 to over 63% today.
“When the customer said, actually, we want cremation,” he said, “I think the industry kind of made a mistake at that moment. It didn’t really nurture that change. It didn’t provide the value to the experience of cremation, like it had to the experience of burial.”
What families were asking for, in other words, was a cheaper, less institutional death – one where the body didn’t disappear into a funeral home and come back as an invoice. But what they got was the same process, marked up, only this time with cremated remains.
And a growing number of families, faced with a version of dignity they could not afford, began improvising.
My friend Danielle Directo-Meston, a fellow journalist in Los Angeles, grew up in a family where death doesn’t happen offstage.
“Filipinos, my family in particular, we go to the cemetery to hang out,” she told me. “We just hang out there for most of the morning and afternoon. And then we’ll go get lunch together.”
They go to sit with relatives who have died, to clean the graves, adorn them with flowers, and spend time as a family; it’s a habit with roots in Undas, the Filipino tradition of spending All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day at the family plot.
Unlike many Americans, Danielle was raised to be comfortable around the dead. She has also had a lot of practice. In the last several years, she has lost a cousin in a motorcycle accident, an uncle after a series of strokes, and both of her grandmothers. She was still not prepared for how the American death-care industry actually operates.
The clearest example came at Rose Hills, a large cemetery in Whittier, California. Rose Hills is owned by Service Corporation International, a conglomerate absorbing independent funeral homes across the country. Danielle’s family was there for a gathering, honoring a passed loved one, when a salesperson approached them.
“When you’re at the cemetery having a family gathering,” she said, “they have salespeople try to sell you on more plots.”
She made it clear this wasn’t one bad day, or one bad salesperson. It was the norm. Anyone attending a service there would encounter it.
After watching her family cycle through this multiple times, Danielle made a different choice for herself. She decided to preplan her own funeral with a Washington-based company that offers natural organic reduction, the process of transforming a human body into soil, legal in a growing number of states.
“It’s around $5,000, which is doable,” she said. “I can pay that when I’m alive, and no one has to worry about it. Compared to $20,000 just for the plot alone at the cemetery, and that’s on top of the mortuary and all of that stuff.”
Danielle will be composted. I scattered my mother by hand in a national park without a permit. Neither of us did what the industry wanted us to do.
Somewhere between the seventh and the eighth bend, I pulled over and slid down an escarpment to an opening with shrubbery and trees. There wasn’t anything particularly special about the space, except for how the light passed through the leaves.
The year before she died, my mother told me she was taking me and my brother to Hawaii. It would have been our first family trip; the furthest we had ever vacationed was Kern River, 90 minutes from home. She had spent years trying to piece together where she came from. Her father was Hawaiian and had left when she was a baby. Her mother had never known her own father either. So my mother spent her life learning who she was the way you learn a language, alone and slowly.
She had already booked the flights for October. But by fall, she was too sick to travel. She died on 26 December, exactly one year after she had told me about the trip.
I looked down at the bag in my hands. I wished I had planned her scattering at night under a full moon, where I could dance naked in front of a fire and chant her blessings. Or that I had carried her to the Redwoods, finding a spot at dawn when the rocks are covered in moss and dew, and the air is crisp. Or even better, smuggled her to Hawaii, and released her over the Pacific at sunset – her favorite time of day.
Instead, I settled on a sunny spot by a newborn tree. It was about 3ft high and eager to grow taller. It would usher in her remains with enthusiasm, and its new life would overcome her old one; a suitable symbolism for the cycle of life.
I opened the bag and shook it around, flinging her into the breeze, watching the particles of a woman who loved me travel toward Half Dome.
I walked back to my car and stretched my arm out the window on the drive down, surfing the wind with my hand. Pieces of my mother flew out from under my fingernails. It is the most loving thing I have ever done for her.
