It's Not Easy to Fly
with a
Dead Person
Bob in a bag in a box in an urn in a bag in another bag in my luggage in Pennsylvania (August 14, 2024)
Not Easy
Taking my late husband back home to rest
Resting Widow Face has a specific kind of gravity. It’s the affect one has when the color and joy of life have completely drained from the world, leaving the eyes too fatigued to maintain the mask of "fine." Apparently, that was the un-camouflage I wore as I stood in the flickering fluorescent glow of the airport terminal at SeaTac.
“I’m traveling with the cremains of my late husband,” I told the TSA agent.
He froze. He took my ID, but his eyes stayed locked on the black ink of Bob’s death certificate. The professional, practiced “Next!” stalled in his throat. He cleared it, leaned in, and whispered, “This way, ma’am,” his voice suddenly losing its sterile, bureaucratic edge. His face fell into a look of panicked reverence, that mix of respect and trepidation people get when they realize they are touching something sacred. He pointed me toward the screening line against the wall as if he were ushering me into a funeral service rather than an X-ray lane.
I’d carried Bob’s ashes around for so long they had blended into the everyday of everything. They’d migrated from the bedroom to the living room and finally into my home office, eventually hunkering down next to the bookcase next to the dog bed. I’d dusted the wooden box without a second thought, my hands numb to the fact that it held the man who used to take up the whole bed. But the young agent’s recoil brought the sharpness of my reality back. The truth couldn’t be suppressed under the hum of airport white noise. Bob was dead. I was walking through a crowd of vacationers with his carbon remains in my hand, flying away to put him in a hole. I swallowed hard against the sudden, familiar lump in my throat and moved forward.
It was the summer of 2024, and it was time. I finally had the courage to face the last step of acceptance by moving Bob from my office to our family plot in Pennsylvania. Standing in that line, fourteen years into widowhood, the memories of 2010 came rushing back in high definition. The silence of the couch where I found him. The waxy stillness of his hands in the casket. The recurring dreams of him being furious that he had to leave the girls and me behind. All of it as if it were happening right then.
I can still hear his voice, performing his best Indiana Jones impression, advising, “Choose wisely,” as I picked out his humble, wooden urn. Yet, strangely, the memory of actually receiving his ashes is a total blank. My brain had performed a sort of tactical strike on that afternoon, wiping the files to protect me. The thought of the cremation itself, of my 6’7” husband advancing on a conveyor belt into an all-consuming fire, was a mental image so gruesome I’d spent over a decade sprinting past it. Even now, sixteen years later, my skin chills at the thought. I know I’ll be up at 3:00 a.m. tonight, staring at the ceiling, replaying the fire I never saw.
Bob weighed 340 pounds in life. Now, he was a fourteen-pound box nestled inside a bright pink carry-on suitcase. I could almost feel his ghost cringing at the foo-foo feminine packaging. Bob was a manly man, and here he was, surrounded by pretty pink luggage tags and frilly unmentionables.
The agent sheepishly looking into the bag that contained the urn (SeaTac, August 14, 2024)
At the X-ray machine, I explained the situation again. The agent looked like he might actually soil himself. He handled the bin like it contained a live bomb. I stared at the monitor as my bag slid into the dark tunnel, wondering what Bob looked like in grayscale. Would a tooth fragment light up? A bone shard? My heart hammered against my ribs making a frantic, hollow sound as I struggled to reconcile the fact that the giant of a man I loved was now reduced to something that fit into a plastic bin between my shoes and my keys.
Once at the gate, I felt like a smuggler. I looked at the sea of travelers, of people scrolling through TikTok, eating overpriced wraps, complaining about delays and wondered who else was carrying a vessel of sorrow like me. Was the woman in the sun hat carrying her mother? Was the man in the suit traveling with a child’s favorite toy? I felt adrift, a ghost among the living. I pulled out my phone and texted a friend. “I hate this.” “I know,” he replied. “What can I do?” He didn’t offer platitudes. He just held space for me, a silent anchor of support while I floated in the heft of the day.
On the plane, the absurdity hit its peak. “Since this is our last trip together, shouldn’t I have bought a first-class ticket?” I muttered. “He’d finally have the legroom he always complained about.” I hoisted the pink suitcase into the overhead bin, laying it carefully on its side. “Dear Lord,” I whispered, buckling my seatbelt, “Please don’t let Bob fall out.”
The guilt was immediate. Was he uncomfortable on his side? Should he be under the seat in front of me? When the man in 12C tried to jam his oversized Tumi into the bin, my Resting Widow Face morphed into Cursing Gargoyle. I lunged out of my seat, my arm snapping out in a chicken-wing instinct, shielding my bag as if I were protecting him in the passenger seat during a sudden brake. My knuckles were white. The man recoiled from my icy glare, opting to find a bin three rows back. I sat down, my heart still racing, guarding that overhead compartment with feral intensity.
Across the aisle, a middle-aged woman leaned her head on her husband’s shoulder. Her hand draped over his knee in that easy, thoughtless way of living. They shared a single pair of earbuds, nodding in sync to a song I couldn't hear. I stared at my own lap, my thumb reflexively twirling my wedding band around a finger that felt too thin. I closed my eyes and pictured Bob in the dark above me, uncomfortably shoved against a stranger's duffel bag.
Taking him home meant the permanent loss of his physical proximity. The urn in my office had been a strange comfort, a way to keep him close without having to say goodbye. As the clouds drifted by, my thoughts alighted on our journeys together. We packed an entire lifetime into the eight years we had before he passed, just two months shy of our anniversary. There was so much left for us to experience, yet in those eight years, there was so much love. Despite him being gone for many more years than we were ever together, Bob’s love didn't dissipate with time. It was frozen, actually, in stasis, a perfect, unchanging snapshot of devotion. And although he could no longer communicate his feelings, there was never a shadow of doubt in my mind that while he was on this earth, my husband deeply loved me.
Putting a box in the ground would not dilute that love or remove it from me. Releasing Bob’s ashes felt like walking through a final, terrifying threshold, but I knew I was ready. As long as I was alive, Bob’s love would carry on inside of me. Exhausted by the weight of the suitcase and the history it held, I finally closed my eyes and tried to nap.
My daughter took this of me as we were leaving the hotel room for Bob's burial. (Erie, PA August 20, 2024)
The days following the flight were a blur of tours. Bob’s ashes rode shotgun in the rental car as I visited an ex-boyfriend at Penn State. They were both former Eagle Scouts and football players, so they got along just fine. Bob waited patiently in the car while I helped at my best friend's daughter's sweet sixteen party. He silently watched as I picked up our two oldest daughters from the Pittsburgh airport. Finally, I hand-delivered the wooden box to the funeral home in a yellow reusable grocery tote that screamed, “WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS.” I could almost hear Bob’s booming laugh at that. I’m certain he thought I lost out on an opportunity, not putting him in the Big Lebowski coffee tin he’d joked about. But I’m sure he approved of the modest receptacle I chose, even though it was a bit more traditional.
On the day of the interment, the sun was softly filtering through the trees. My daughters and I pressed our palms against the cool wood of the urn one last time before it lowered into the Pennsylvania dirt, right across from my parents. We tossed some roses on top before they filled in the space around him. The pink suitcase and the yellow lemon bag went home with me, sitting empty on my bedroom floor for weeks, remains of a journey completed.
I went back last summer to tend the grave. The grass has finally knit itself back together over the hole, hiding the scar in the earth. I sat on top of him, trimming the weeds and chatting about the girls. This summer, I’ll bring my youngest daughter back to the cemetary in Erie; she hasn’t seen it yet. Meg will trace my name, already carved into the stone alongside her father’s. And we will cry.
The absolute of death is a cruel, heavy reality. But as I sat there on the grass, next to my late husband, next to my parents, I could feel that although the boxes were deep in the ground, their love didn't dissipate. It was still there, very present. Indelible. Inside of me.
April 1, 2026