Taking My Husband’s Ashes Home

A PERILOUS, NOSTALGIC, OCCASIONALLY HILARIOUS JOURNEY TO CORNWALL

“Tinners’ Way” near Penzance, Cornwall (Author photo)

It is entirely legal to take someone’s ashes (“cremains,” in creepy cremation society lingo) from the U.S. to the U.K. All you need are a death certificate and a letter from the cremation people — details that had not occurred to me until I was leaving for the airport.

Oh, well.

(I am not sure what laws I recently broke, or what the statute of limitations for sending me off into London Tower may be, so let’s just keep this story between us friends. Including any TSA people or customs agents who may be reading along.)

A piece of my husband’s San Francisco soul was always in Cornwall. Generations of ancestors walked those ancient pathways in the pre-dawn darkness, headed deep underground into the mines that, long abandoned now, still dot the landscape.

So it’s been in the back of my mind, ever since my good husband Bud died in 2019, to take some of his ashes back to The Fatherland. And thus it was that I found myself landing at London’s Heathrow Airport with two small vials of his earthly remains plus a quart-size baggie, triple-baggie’d just to be safe, with more. And no requisite documentation. It was not that I don’t still have multiple copies of the death certificate, or that I couldn’t have found the name of those cremation people we signed up with several decades ago if it had occurred to me. It had just not occurred, and this was an inconvenient time to run back to the apartment and get things.

An extremely polite customs man motioned me aside, as my carry-on emerged from the scanner. It was then that I first realized — since I wasn’t smuggling any controlled substances or sneaking California produce into the country — that Bud’s ashes were at risk of remaining at Heathrow Airport forever, rather than scattered on hallowed Cornish fields. Any doubts about this possibility were erased when the young man gently lifted the baggie from its comfortable space and laid it on the table. Wordlessly, he began to run a small scanner back and forth across it.

Never say I can’t think on my feet, even after they’ve just gone through the airport scanner. I thought: Hmmm. He wasn’t at all concerned with the vials. As it happened, I’d found little 4-oz clear plastic tubes somewhere in an assortment of never-used beauty containers, so they bore labels that said “Skin cleanser” and “Conditioner.” The customs agent, now having pulled out an even more serious-looking scanner, was carefully running it back and forth, occasionally looking up with a pleasant expression.

I said something offhand about ashes used in facial cleaning. He said something, still with a pleasant expression, about “having to be certain about inorganic material.” (Inorganic? One’s mortal ashes?) To be honest (now, at least,) I think both of us still had questions. But he just carefully placed the baggies back where they had been and closed my suitcase. I was on my way, all ashes with me.

The person who would enjoy this story most of anyone I know is my late husband. I choose to believe he is, in some inorganic state, enjoying it on some celestial cloud.

Low tide at the harbor, St Ives (Author photo)

I met my daughter Sandy at Heathrow and we splurged on a driver to travel the utterly gorgeous countryside that Bud and I had enjoyed together so many times. Without that excellent assistant (Thanks, Sabir!) there is no way we would have found our AirB&B cottage above the harbor in St Ives, nestled among other cottages and shops in the labyrinth of steep, winding cobblestone alleys of this charming fishing village — where I had always stayed with Bud, who knew his way around. I did not; I still do not.

We spent a day or two readjusting our inner time clocks and enjoying St Ives, Cornwall. It was then time for the first half of the mission: spreading a few ashes in the sculpture garden of the English artist Dame Barbara Hepworth, who lived and worked in St Ives from the beginning of World War II until her death — in a fire in her studio in 1975.

The Hepworth Museum and sculpture garden are a quick walk from the Tate St Ives Museum, one of my favorite museums in the United Kingdom. They adjoin her former studio, now preserved and feeling as if she just left for a spot of afternoon tea.

I managed to get myself into the mirror in the framed collage (Author photo)

Hepworth moved to St Ives in 1939 with her husband, the painter and sculptor Ben Nicholson (and their 5-year-old triplets, two sons and a daughter,) and lived there until her death in an accidental fire in the studio in 1975. Their story, and the stories of other artists who flourished in that time and place, are fascinating. As is the adjacent sculpture garden serene in its surrounding lush greenery, which was a haven for Bud and me.

But do the present-day managers of it all welcome scatterers of ashes? We thought it unwise to ask. So, after making sure no other visitors were nearby and giving thanks that the winds had subsided, we each quietly emptied a vial behind a Hepworth sculpture. It felt right.

Sandy after finishing her scattering task (Author photo)

The next day it was on to find the right spot for the final resting place of the rest of Bud’s ashes, grateful that it had not been Heathrow Airport after all.

We found another intrepid driver (ask for Barry) to tour us around the countryside, and specifically to get us to a remote area of the Tinners’ Way — a 16-mile stretch of pathway along the coast where generations of miners walked on their way to work. Bud and I covered much of it, a few miles at a time, on visits to Cornwall.

Again, as informed, agreeable and charming as we found Cornish-native Barry to be, we thought that trying to explain the ashes mission was a story too far. Having made it through customs, I also didn’t want to risk losing my precious cargo to HRH Charles III’s National Trust, which maintains the landscape. So we just said we wanted to do a walk of a mile or so, at some remote point.

Along the Tinners’ Way, Cornwall (Author photo)

There are plenty of remote points along the Tinners’ Way. We found one (above) that seemed right.

And there, in the tall grasses and the rocky soil of Cornwall, lie a few of the mortal remains of this last generation of Johns’. May they rest in peace.

Mission accomplished.