Published: 12 February 2025.
by Gerry Gaffney
On a Friday night Teresa and I went to the pub for a quiet evening meal. We bumped into some people we knew, there was live music, and we ended up staying quite late.
In the morning, I was feeling a little worse for wear. Teresa was unsympathetic.
"Go to gym, sweat out some of that alcohol," she told me.
"Okay St Teresa."
She smirked. "I do enjoy wearing my halo of sober superiority."
"By the way," she went on, "do you recall chatting to that old guy?"
I had a vague, a very vague, memory of talking to a man in a wheelchair after the music had finished.
"Yes," I said confidently.
"So you remember the lovely heartfelt promise you made to him."
I was tempted to give another confident affirmative answer but fortunately recognised the trap that Teresa was preparing for me. She would lead me deeper and deeper into unknown territory until I reached the point where I would have to admit I had no idea what she was talking about. I decided to preempt that.
"Not exactly," I said.
"Not exactly, or not really, or not at all?"
"Uh, not exactly, really, at all."
"Don't remember any promise, then? No undertaking of heroic deeds?"
"Uh..."
"Promises of travel and repatriation..."
"Uh..."
"Last wishes of a dying man and his deceased wife..."
A memory was dragging itself up from the murky deep.
"Ashes!" I said, pleased with my powers of recollection.
"Correct," she congratulated me. "Any more detail?"
"Uh..."
"Like promising to take his wife's ashes to Ireland, scatter them in some little village that apparently you know well. Something that sounds like Elephant."
"Oh," I said, as the memory gradually reassembled itself into a more intelligible entity.
I was now thoroughly awake, and a feeling of regret and dread was forming in the pit of my stomach.
Between Teresa's recounting and my own fragmented memory I pieced together what had happened.
We'd begun talking to Bernie when the music stopped, the musicians were packing up and the bar staff were dropping decreasingly diplomatic hints about finishing up and going home. It was unlike me to be talkative with strangers - that was Teresa's role - but apparently the alcohol had disposed me towards social interaction.
Bernie was in a wheelchair and clearly unwell.
We discovered that his wife was, like me, from County Roscommon, in Ireland.
"I tried to extricate you," said Teresa, "but you were having none of it."
Bernie had emigrated to Australia in his 20's. He'd worked as a labourer on building sites and in the mining industry. His trips back to Ireland had become less frequent as his ties became more tenuous, and stopped altogether after his parents died. He'd met his Irish wife, Maura, in Sydney, and they were married for 35 years. They had no children. Maura, he told us, would have liked to visit Ireland more often, but they'd lost a lot of their life savings making naive and highly speculative investment decisions during the dotcom period. A trip to Ireland had been out of reach in recent years.
Maura's health had never been robust, and she had died of pneumonia a year previously. Bernie told us that she'd stated a wish for her ashes to be scattered in the old graveyard in Elphin, near where her family had lived when she was a child. Bernie had promised her he would make the trip to do so. Bad luck struck again, and Bernie was diagnosed with mesothelioma. According to his doctor, the prognosis was bleak. Bernie was not going to live long enough to keep his promise.
But he was a cheerful enough character, it seemed. His only regret in life, he told us, was that he wouldn't be able to visit Ireland to scatter Maura's ashes and fulfil his promise.
"Oh yeah," I said to Teresa, "that's right. Now I remember it all. Why didn't you stop me?"
"Apparently your ankles were immune to injury. If you look, you'll probably find extensive bruising."
Now that she mentioned it, I did have a sore ankle. I had a quick look and indeed there was bruising.
"You did that?"
"Yep. But it didn't work."
At some point during Bernie's sob story I'd volunteered to take the ashes back to Ireland and scatter them on his behalf.
In fact, Teresa told me, I'd promised to do so in the very near future so that Bernie could die in peace, knowing that he'd fulfilled his late wife's last wish.
"How can we get out of it?"
"We? Oh no, not 'we'. Just you, my good man, my stalwart hero."
"Enough with the sarcasm. How can I get out of it?"
"Weasel out, you mean," said Teresa.
I'm sure I looked glum. I certainly felt it.
"Remember," she said, "you promised to meet him on Monday to pick up the ashes."
I put my head in my hands. I didn't quite remember, but it had the ring of veracity.
"I could just not show up."
Teresa laughed. "Yeah, ghost him. Nice thing to do to a dying man. Probably his wife would haunt you. Anyway, you can't do that."
"Why not?"
"Because you're the intrepid hero. You have to accept the challenge that's been set down for you."
"What about work? I can't take time off at the drop of a hat. The project won't be finished for another 3 months. I can't just abandon my team."
"Poor old Bernie didn't look like he has another three months left in him."
"Maybe I could ask someone back home to do it."
"I suppose. Outsource your heroism. If you're going to do that you can just go online, get some poor gig economy worker to take over the whole thing. Uber ashes. Scatteroo. Ashtasker."
"Ha ha."
On Monday I met with Bernie as arranged. He didn't look well.
He had an Aldi bag hooked onto the right arm of his wheelchair. He got me to take it. Inside there was a plain wooden box.
"That's Maura."
He sucked on his inhaler.
"I can't tell you how much this means to me."
He asked me when I was thinking of going to Ireland.
"Very soon," I told him. "I just have to hand over some stuff at work."
At work, however, there was no way I could just hand stuff over and disappear for a week or more. Well, I could, but I would not be receiving a warm welcome on my return. Or any welcome.
Teresa was unsympathetic.
Maura's ashes were in their box on the mantelpiece. I'd looked up what was involved in taking a person's ashes into Ireland. It turned out there was a bit of paperwork needed. A death certificate. A statement from the crematorium. As if a box of ashes isn't enough of a statement, I thought. Clearly dead.
I rang Bernie. He wasn't the texting generation. He didn't have a death certificate, he said. It was apparent that paperwork wasn't his strong point.
"Don't worry about it," I told him. "But maybe I can help you get online and get a certificate?"
I went to his house. Everything was falling apart. I set my laptop on the kitchen table and we ordered a copy of the death certificate easily enough. Bernie couldn't remember the name of the funeral director, which meant it was going to be difficult to get cremation documentation. I decided I'd have to wing it.
"I don't think Bernie's going to last until the end of my project," I told Teresa. "And I can't get time off because we're really up against it in this final push. Realistically I'm going to be doing 6 days a week from now until we're done, so I can't even do it as a fly-in fly-out long weekend thing."
"At least you're taking it seriously," she said. "I admire that."
That was something. But not much.
"I had an idea," I said a day or two later.
"Oh." Teresa gave me the skeptical look she does so well. The one that communicates a complete disbelief in advance in whatever I'm about to say.
"Well, I'm definitely going to go to Ireland and spread those damn ashes."
"Ssh, Maura will hear you," she said, tilting her head towards the box on the mantelpiece.
"In the meantime, we can Photoshop a picture of me spreading the ashes into a photo of the graveyard at Elphin. There's heaps of photos online believe it or not. Genealogy groups and all that ancestry stuff. I'll make sure to stay away from the pub for a while and I'm not likely to run into Bernie anywhere else. Then I can "come back." Show him the photo. Job done. Bernie dies a happy man. When the project finishes, I'll take a few weeks, we can go to Ireland for a holiday, scatter the ashes properly then in real life.
Teresa looked dubious, then thoughtful.
"A devious but not inherently evil compromise," she eventually conceded.
We spent a bit of time choosing a photo online.
The next step was that I had to get a photo of me emptying a box of ashes to paste into the graveyard shot. I was reluctant to open the box Bernie gave me, but I decided for veracity I'd have to use it. I was relieved to find that there was another container inside, which held the ashes. I stored that carefully, then filled the wooden box with ashes from the charcoal barbecue. Smelled good.
Then Teresa and I did the photoshoot. I wore winter clothes because Ireland.
Unfortunately we quickly reached the point at which I realised my Photoshop skills were simply not up to the task. Teresa examined my efforts and agreed.
So we did the obvious thing and turned to AI. I gave it a selection of photos of the Elphin graveyard and a few of me tipping the charcoal ashes and told it to combine into a single realistic and compelling image. The AI produced a lot of duds but three shots that I thought were excellent.
Teresa and I picked the two we thought worked best. The church in the background was lovely and clear on a crisp wintry day. I had a solemn expression as Maura's ashes poured from the box and drifted across the graveyard.
Seeing those photographs gave me a great sense of relief. While I hadn't actually scattered Maura's ashes, I had good evidence that I had. In spirit at least, I'd made a spiritual trip to Ireland to make a sick old man happy.
A week later, on my return from my fictitious trip to Ireland, we met with Bernie in the pub. He was delighted to see me, and shook my hand as enthusiastically as he could, given his weak state. I gave him hard copies of two photos. He examined them in great detail. Then he asked me to send them to him. I did so and he opened them on his phone.
As he pinched and zoomed like a teenager I had a rising feeling of trepidation.
"What happened to your hand?" he asked.
"Eh?"
He passed me the phone. In the photo he'd zoomed in on, my left hand had an additional finger. It was very obvious once you'd seen it.
"Weird," I said. "Must be some sort of reflection or something."
"It is weird." He sounded concerned.
"There's something not right." He sounded skeptical.
I was feeling annoyed. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. I'd taken all the effort of taking his wife's ashes to the middle of nowhere in Ireland - at least as far as he knew - and now he was casting doubts on the entire enterprise.
He continued to pinch and zoom, his frown deepening and my mood sinking by the moment. I wished I'd never met the ungrateful old wretch.
"Did you have your little time machine with you as well?" he asked.
"What?"
He zoomed in and passed me the phone again.
There was a sign on an A-frame outside the church.
"Covid-19 testing. 9am to 5pm."
I wanted to bluff, to say that the sign must have been there from the Covid days three or four years ago, but that was just not plausible.
I kept staring at the phone trying to figure out what to say. I didn't want to look up and see Bernie's disappointed face.
Then I heard a snort from Teresa. I looked up. She was trying not to laugh. I looked at Bernie. He had a wide grin. His wheelchair rocked from side to side as he began to laugh. Then his cough took over and he reached for his inhaler. He inhaled deeply from it a few times and got his coughing and laughing under control.
"What the hell is going on?" I asked.
"I ran into your lovely young lassie last week and she told me about your problem and your solution. I'm sorry to take so much pleasure from your efforts, but the dying man takes his amusement where he can. My Maura was a bit of a prankster herself. And sure I know you'll take her back when you can. No matter if I'm gone by then."
He studied me for a moment. I was feeling an emotion that I can't identify but don't ever want to experience again.
"You're a good man," he said.
He caught the barman's eye.
"Eddy, another round over here if you'd be so kind."
If you enjoyed this story, please consider sharing it and giving it a positive rating on whatever podcast service you use.
Copyright © Gerry Gaffney 2025