Keeping His Ashes: A Memoir About Love and Dying

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.