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    Keeping His Ashes: A Memoir About Love and Dying
    Keeping His Ashes: A Memoir About Love and Dying
    Keeping His Ashes: A Memoir About Love and Dying
    Ebook124 pages2 hours

    Keeping His Ashes: A Memoir About Love and Dying

    By Claudia Ellquist

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    About this ebook

    Keeping His Ashes is a book about death and the wrenching grief that follows the loss of someone we cannot bear to lose. Claudia's husband, Scotti, dies from cancer, she miscarries their only child a month before his Stage IV diagnosis, and their beloved dog dies.

     

    Readers bond with Claudia and Scotti. We share the life-altering effect of Scotti's fall into a leaf fire as a child, his scientific studies, his skilled carpentry work, and his atheism. We share Claudia's strength — and her vulnerability — as her life falls apart, and we see how her faith sustains her through her multiple losses. We learn wonderfully unsentimental specifics about what a chemo-drip "closet" is like, why chemo patients lose their hair, what a suicide drug stash means to someone in unremitting pain, and how bodies are fed into the mouth of a crematory furnace.

     

    But Claudia's unique and powerful insights are the overarching draw of this book. This is a love story that goes beyond love to the course of a grief that unfolds, impossibly, into peace and service to the living.

     

    A chapter from Keeping His Ashes, "When Brown Bats Fall From Safety," won third prize in the Tucson Festival of Books writing contest in 2014, and will be included in the anthology Coyotes. Another chapter, "A Box Like A Baby," about Claudia picking up Scotti's ashes after his cremation, was published in Months to Years online magazine in their summer 2019 issue.

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBruvald-Dosset Books
    Release dateJun 30, 2020
    ISBN9781393163213
    Keeping His Ashes: A Memoir About Love and Dying
    Author

    Claudia Ellquist

    Claudia Ellquist spent her life serving as a mentor, role model, and beacon of hope to many people. She practiced law before devoting herself to forty-plus years of community activism. Throughout her life, Claudia was guided by her faith, and by love. She had a profound effect on the people she encountered during her lifelong pursuit of justice and mercy.

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    • 5/5
      Keeping His Ashes is a book about death and the agonizing grief that follows the loss of someone we cannot bear to lose. Claudia's husband, Scotti, dies from cancer, she miscarries their only child just before his Stage IV diagnosis, and their beloved dog Ralph dies. We share Claudia's strength, and her vulnerability, as her life completely falls apart, how her faith sustains her through her multiple losses. As you read you bond with Claudia and Scotti and are touched by Claudia's unique and powerful insights, which is another of the reasons this book is so special. This is a love story that goes beyond love and the grief that unfolds in Claudia’s life, as Claudia finally finds peace and re-devotes her life to service to the community.

      Claudia passed away in late 2018, also from cancer. Claudia was the real deal, a wonderful caring, intelligent, and thoughtful human being. I know this first hand, she was one of my best friends. The book covers the part of her life which just precedes the time I knew her. When I say that Claudia was the real deal I really mean it. Besides being a talented and gifted writer, she was also an accomplished organizer and political activist for decades. I had the privilege to work with her on a number of campaigns and projects and I was honored to be her campaign manager both times when she ran for Pima County Arizona County Attorney. Claudia believed deeply in social justice and equality. She abhorred violence of any kind, including the violence of inequitable treatment by our criminal justice system and the use of the death penalty. Her main goal for these election campaigns was to clean up a corrupt county office that was over zealous and deceitful in prosecuting cases and to put an end to the death penalty in Arizona’s second largest county. And now just a few years after her passing, some of these reforms are finally beginning to happen. She would be so pleased. This book is a final lasting tribute to a kind and gentle woman and a life well lived. So many of us loved you Claudia!

      Dave Stewart

    Book preview

    Keeping His Ashes - Claudia Ellquist

    When brown bats fall from safety

    The brown bats do not fly from their haven exit; they fall. Scotti and I would sit at dusk on the deck that he had built on the west side of the leased Forest Service cabin. The sun would set in the pine and oak of the mountainside, and dusk would descend, and we would sip our drinks and hold hands and wait for the brown nectar bats to emerge.

    Our talk was desultory and in hushed murmurs. Neither of us wanted to talk about the day, and certainly not about tomorrow. We both wanted to listen. There was a bit of sighing wind in the trees, and there was a muffled noise in the distance from traffic heading down the mountain to homes an hour away. Then there were the last piercing calls of day birds seeking out safe branches to light on before the darkness closed.

    The silence, when it comes, is profound, without constant city rumbles, the buzzes of anonymous machines, or the sloosh-clanging of water running in pipes beneath your feet. Sound here is not background, but event. So, the silence itself becomes something you can hear.

    We wait.

    ––––––––

    Come out and sit with me, Claudia. I want to show you something, he had said to me one evening, a year before, when we had not yet heard the word Cancer.

    One arm draped warmly on my shoulder, he had pointed to the hole, a dark knot in the cabin’s log wall. Watch that. And listen. There’ll be a tiny noise there first.

    Finally, it comes. The skittering sound of clambering, mouse-like feet. Then the bat peers out into our darkness, which is still too starry-bright for bat eyes. For an instant it hesitates, there on the brink, and then, almost as though shoved from behind, it heaves out into the expanse and plummets downward. Its wings are still wrapped rigidly round its brown ball body and it hurls down, straight and fast as falling, surely destined, like any weight, to prove gravity with a hard thunk below.

    But then the comedy-tragedy of the fall is converted, before our eyes, to awkward grace, and our snickery lips are pursed in awe. The compacted creature opens up more like an umbrella than a butterfly. Two soft brown wings of skin reach out, with the grace of things that function as they are intended. It is like destiny. It is like death snatched back to life. It is like surprises that come to us when we are no longer young.

    We had watched the fall and resurrection of the brown bat many times since. But now we had heard the word Cancer. And we thought about this word, but did not speak. Instead, we sat and waited for the brown bat to emerge, again, into the night.

    The next day we folded our camp goods and drove back to our city lives. Once in town, I moved the leftover picnic to the refrigerator and carried the bedding in from the pickup, while Scotti showered and then lay down. As I pushed dirty clothes into a hamper, there were big splashy tears, which I licked silently off my chin. Since he couldn’t see me just then, I could release the guard on my face. I hated chemotherapy days.

    This is a new chemotherapy. The first one had done nothing but deplete his strength and put him in the hospital. The odds on it had only been twenty percent, but when you are new at it, you assume that you will be the lucky twenty, and why not?

    When it failed, we did not ask Why me, Lord? With thousands of good people dying disregarded, in wars and want everywhere daily, we do not ask why we are spared that, so it would seem arrogant to feel singled out now. And more, we know that each one of us must die; death is the final part of living a life. But in America our culture hides the dying, and medicine and science offer us hope to put death off, like an unpaid bill that we could dispute or ignore or explain away.

    After the first chemo failed, we were sent for evaluation for experimental but promising treatments; it’s good we live so close to a teaching hospital where such things are done. But we left the evaluation considerably sobered. They informed us that Scotti is not strong enough to be a candidate; he is too weak, and too near death. We huddled together as we walked out the door, and blinked at the brightness of the sunlight.

    How can you take it so calmly? l asked him. I’d lost it to tears so many times by then. He just soldiered on.

    I guess I’ve known it would be like this. When they caught the other cancer twenty-three years ago, I decided it was all borrowed time. I’ve had a long free ride. He put his arm around me. And I’ve had you.

    The third chemotherapy had twelve-percent odds. But, somehow—thank you, God—it took. Someone has to beat the odds, he had said. The last time we were at the cabin, I thought I’d never see it again. If the winter is mild, I may live to see it yet.

    And so, we had our reprieve. We’d been to the cabin. We had visits from his sister, the last sharer of his childhood. Her husband chopped piles of firewood and she sat with us, unraveling and reweaving memories. Then my sister, Stephanie, had come down from Oregon, to sit beside him and remember with him the crazy times of our courtship, when the three of us went everywhere together.

    The previous month, he and I had even gone to Mexico. Our friends, Sam and Lucille, had driven the twelve-hundred miles, in their temperamental VW van, to disinfect our house and set it up for our two-week stay, and greet us when we came. We did not sail or hike or swim, but we slept under the mosquito net, in the palapa-covered house that Scotti had built himself, before the Cancer. We had picked our own papayas and watered our own banana tree. We had lain together in the warm sun, and had watched as the heavy waters tossed on the shore, as gravity called it forth and down. Juan Carlos and Eugenia had brought leaves of a macho grande tree for me to make a cancer-curing tea, and an American nurse had loaned us her respiratory therapy machine. At the L.A. airport, on our way home, Scotti got into a wheelchair for the first time. After seven months, the reprieve was over.

    ––––––––

    On a Tuesday, he told me that he had trouble moving his tongue to one side, and it hurt to swallow. He had another MRI that same day, the echoes booming ominously at him from inside the hollow body-tunnel of the machine. This time the camera drew two new, milky images on the screen. The cancer had gone to his brain.

    A barrier of blood vessels protects the brain from the poisons and the predatory germs that trespass regularly into our bodies. This protective barrier had kept the medical chemicals of the seven-month reprieve from affecting Scotti’s cerebrum. But it had not kept the cancer out. The remission that our twelve-percent miracle had worked in reducing the lesions, or at least keeping them from growing and colonizing outside the eight bone sites where the cancer resided when first diagnosed, was over.

    The chemo offered now had only one virtue; it was one of a handful of chemicals that could cross the barrier and follow the cancer to the brain. It had sometimes been effective against other cancers, brain cancers unrelated to Scotti’s kind of adenocarcinoma with an unknown primary. There are more than two hundred kinds of cancer, and each one of them is different, unique. No odds were offered to us this time.

    ––––––––

    Chemotherapy rooms are small closets, off an upstairs hallway in a large medical complex. There is a built-in cot the patient lies upon, but the chair for his companion must be moved out to the corridor if he comes in on a gurney, at least until he is transferred in. We waited while they gurneyed out the patient who’d preceded us. I thanked God that Scotti was, however slowly, still walking.

    We had already talked with the doctor, and one nurse had walked us down the hall and settled us in. Then another, the chemo nurse, came in to hook him up. The chemo needle is a steel pin that goes into the thin vein on the back of the hand. The pin is attached to the drip tubing that goes up to the bag that holds saline, and several thousands of dollars of deadly alkaloids, and all your hopes. The bag is a plastic pouch and it rests on another steel bar, a tall metal stand. The piece of steel in his hand keeps the patient very still, because to twist a bit to the right or left is painful. The tall steel stand rests precariously on its metal feet, and in this cramped place the patient’s companion is constrained from restlessness, lest it be knocked askew. It takes four or five hours, with successive bags, so it is a lot of staying still.

    They give him something in it to make him drowsy, and that helps. It is just me who must pass the time constrained. Once he is dozing, I try to read a magazine I have brought, but that doesn’t last long. I look at his hand, lying there so still. He has the loveliest hands in the world. They have a graceful curl that comes from years of turning them sideways. He held them thus to hide the deformity of a lack of extension and of mobility that came from falling forward into a leaf fire when he was a toddler. The burned skin on three fingers of the left hand had healed badly, and he lacked full use of them. It is the kind of disability that is not overt enough for people to allow for it, and which, therefore, makes a boy grow up thoughtful, figuring out ways to unobtrusively cope. It makes for quietness in the

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