By Rom Watson
c. September 9, 2014
When someone dies and they’re cremated, this is what their ashes come in:
You may choose to transfer the ashes to a fancy urn, but what you get from the crematorium is one of these, filled with ashes, ashes in a plastic bag tied with a twist-tie.
Other than memories and a few photographs, this container is all I have left of my friend Robert Dixon, who died in his mid-thirties in 1989.
Years before, in 1983, in a second-run theatre on LaBrea Avenue near Melrose where you could see two movies for three dollars, I happened to see a movie about a young woman. This young woman had a friend, an older woman she would occasionally visit for advice. A mentor.
Toward the end of the movie, the young woman goes to visit her friend. She gets off her bicycle, she walks it through the gate, and as she leans her bike against the fence I thought to myself, “Her friend is dead.” It was suddenly obvious to me that the only reason the friend existed in the movie was so she could die. The young woman would now use the death of her friend as inspiration to pursue her dreams after all.
I watched as the young woman entered the house. Guess what? The house was empty. Her friend was dead! “How predictable,” I thought to myself. “What a crummy movie.”
However, when it happens to you in real life, and you lose a friend of ten years, . . .you do stop, and take stock, and ask yourself, “How do I want to spend the time that I have left?”
The good news is that you don’t have to be like the young woman in the movie. You don’t have to wait for a friend to die. You do not have to wait for Lilia Skala to kick the bucket in the final reel. You can at any time decide what you want to leave behind after you’ve gone from this world.
Besides one of these.
