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.
