“Mom, I don’t think you should have dad made into a bong.”

She chortles with laughter.

“That’s not a bong, it’s a bud vase! Besides, I was looking at the paperweights. There’s one that looks like Starry Night.”

What to do with my father had been a bit of an issue. A few years ago, both of my parents made arrangements to donate their bodies to science. But dad died near the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic when everything was in lockdown, so when mom called to tell them the time was nearing and ask what the next steps would be, they told her the company wasn’t accepting any planned donations.

Suddenly we were faced with the near-term prospect of a having a body on our hands and nowhere to put it, which is a very weird problem to have. After some mildly frantic online research and a couple of calls, the problem was solved. Dad died the next day.

We had him cremated, but then we were faced with the question of what to do with dad’s ashes. There was a long-term plan to scatter the cremains (yes, they really call them cremains) in places that had been important to him when he was growing up. The only drawback was that none of us live near those places.

One thing about a grave is that it provides a kind of focal point. You can grieve anywhere, but a grave, or a crypt, or a tree or mountaintop where a loved one’s ashes were scattered, offers a kind of permission to tune everything else out and really remember them. It’s like an emotional anchor reminding us that they may be gone physically, but we’re still connected to them.

We needed an anchor.

It was at this point that mom remembered visiting a little store that sold glass art, among other things, and the information about one of the artists mentioned glass that incorporated ashes. That was all she needed. She pulled out her phone (her very first smartphone – more on that later) and went to work.

Soon the texts with links and photos began arriving. It turns out there’s a whole industry built around incorporating the ashes of loved ones – people and pets – into art glass mementos. Some of them are really quite lovely. Some of them are… not. They’re like memories, that way.

I like to remember dad in the Minnesota days, shoveling snow, chopping wood, grumbling about digging up and moving one of mom’s rosebushes for the third time. That was also when he decided I had grown enough that he should teach me self-defense moves. This led to my inadvertently sending a classmate who had grabbed me from behind hurtling through the air in front of half the school, and the teacher, and possibly the principal. Under the circumstances dad couldn’t really officially approve, but he was quietly proud that the lessons had sunk in. And, in my defense, startling the hell out of people by grabbing them from behind was Just. Not. Done. Particularly at our house.

At 15 I left home to go away to school. For many years after that dad and I saw each other rarely, and I worried that we were estranged. We gave each other reasons to be disappointed. We were both angry at ourselves – and sometimes others – for our own reasons. We could not talk about politics or religion or current events. I believed we couldn’t talk about anything, really, until he was ravaged by lymphoma and it suddenly hit me that every time I said goodbye could be the last time.

He softened in his last years, becoming sociable and good-natured, and surprisingly funny (though he still listened to too much talk radio). I made more of an effort to tell him directly that I loved him. In the end, I knew he loved me and was proud of me, and was pretty sure he knew I loved and was proud of him. It wasn’t until after he died that I found out he felt we had finally grown close. Learning that healed something in me.

Sometimes we can’t see clearly what kind of relationship we have with another person until after they’re gone. That’s when we find out that they always believed that we were one of the best people they knew, that we would be a star, that we always outshone everyone else in the room, that we would write the mythical great American novel, that we really would change the world. Or simply that they they felt very close to and deeply loved by us.

The things they couldn’t tell us while they were alive, or that we couldn’t hear, are carried back to us in translation by others who knew them better than we did, or differently, at any rate.

These may be things we wish we’d known while the person was still with us. We may think that knowing would somehow have made a difference. But who’s to say? Maybe knowing how they felt would have allowed us to build a deeper relationship that we could recognize. Maybe it would have changed nothing at all.

In the end, they loved us and felt loved by us. They believed us capable of great things. When all is said and done, maybe that’s the most important part.

Mom decided she didn’t want dad’s ashes made into anything fussy or maudlin. That wouldn’t have suited either of them. So she went with glass orbs that look like Starry Night.

Now I have a swirling blue dadweight that sits on my desk and watches me write. Sometimes we even talk. I think dad would have liked it.