Audio Ashes

Robin reached out in response to my call for conversations. She couldn’t travel to the Berkshires when her sister scattered their mother’s ashes alongside their father’s, decades after his death. Instead, her sister saved some ashes for her. Robin keeps them in her mother’s old jewelry pouch and carries them with her to political marches. We met at her light-filled home at the end of a leafy cul-d...

Laurie responded to a call for stories while I was visiting another city. She keeps the ashes of both her mother and stepfather in her home. When I arrived, her house was filled with the warmth of Christmas and Hanukkah — stockings, lights, and a quiet sense of family. We talked at her kitchen table, where she shared memories of a deeply loving mother and a stepfather who became a steady, devoted...

Claudette was the first person I spoke with outside a home. She lived six hours away and happened to be visiting when we met. She spoke about her parents, her deep love for her father, and a mother who never once said “I love you.” As with so many of these conversations, it’s the quiet, human details that stay with me. Claudette carried her father’s ashes through his childhood home, a place now cr...

Nicole became emotional almost as soon as she began talking about her father. There was deep admiration in her voice, and so many tears. Her father’s ashes are divided into three containers in her home, each representing a different relationship to him. One of those containers took years to recover. Nicole eventually drove hours to retrieve it just before an estate liquidation, finding it wrapped...

I met Callie in her vibrant, textured home, where color lived on every wall, and a cat and dog welcomed me at the door. We spoke about her mother and her husband, two very different lives, two very different deaths. Her husband chose the Neptune Society; her mother, raised Greek Orthodox, broke with tradition and asked to be cremated. As Callie shared their stories, she pointed out two objects in...

In this episode, we sit at Liz’s sunny dining table, where an unexpected and beautiful conversation unfolds. She tells us about her mother, Mary Ann Shaffer, the librarian who, in her final years, co-wrote The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and passed away before witnessing its success. Liz also shares the story of her husband, a Vietnam veteran who died from Agent Orange-related ca...

This is the story of Gua Gua, Melanie’s mother. In our conversation, I met a woman who lived boldly, left when life got hard, and came back just when Melanie was older. She loved tequila and made everyone around her laugh all the time. For Melanie, the relationship is complicated but filled with real affection, a mix of ache, joy, and a love that keeps returning, just like Gua Gua herself. Melanie...

This is Audio Ashes, where the stories we tell breathe life into those we’ve lost and the ashes we keep become windows into love, memory, and everything we still carry.

In Wendy’s home rest the ashes of three women who shaped her world: her grandmother, her mother, and her best friend. Two embody the ease of unconditional love; the third, her mother, carries a history braided with both tenderness and hurt. As we sat together, stories surfaced gently: moments of joy, moments that stung, surprising turns in a life still being understood. And when Wendy went to gath...