Remembering My Dad (and Ross Dress for Less)

On his birthday (and on his death day)—here's my final takeaway.

Apr 07, 2026

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SEVERAL DAYS AFTER MY FATHER was cremated, my brother Jordan and I were sitting in the mortuary’s foyer, waiting for the arrival of the guy who worked the incinerator. I hadn’t seen my brother in close to fifteen years, and our mood was pensive and awkward but tender too. Our father’s departure had reunited us.

Finally, a door opened, and in walked an extremely tall guy dressed in an ill-fitting suit. Instantly I thought of Lurch from the Addams Family. He was carrying my dad’s ashes in a blue and white Ross Dress for Less shopping bag. If you’ve never retrieved human cremated remains, I will prepare you: The box of ashes is heavy.

I mentioned this to my brother, who agreed and added that a friend’s mother’s ashes—which he and his wife had retrieved the year before—had contained teeth. My evil twin asked, “Whose teeth?” My brother scoffed and said, “It’s never just ashes to ashes. It’s ashes to ashes and some molars and bridgework.”

On the way out, I told the manager that I thought it was weird that our father’s ashes were presented to us in a Ross Dress for Less bag. And the manager said he ‘understood’ but reminded my brother that during the intake, my brother had declined the manager’s upsell for a fifty-dollar tote that would have been more ‘appropriate.’

“Oh, brother,” I muttered.

Spring was lovely and warm that afternoon, so we stopped for coffee (oddly, my dad died exactly on his birthday that April), and we wanted to sit outside with our drinks and our Dad-In-A-Bag placed on the floor between us.

I consider embalming and open caskets existentially bizarre. But now, while my brother shared news about his newborn and my foot occasionally knocked against the dad bag, I couldn’t shake the surreal aura of the moment. The entirety of the man who loved and terrorized us as kids was now ash in a bag under a table at Starbucks. This was much odder than an open casket ceremony.

Eventually, my brother and I started to discuss the tacky experience at the mortuary, the Ross Dress for Less thing, and the mortuary’s nickel and diming. But then we paused, looked down at the bag, and busted out laughing. Soon we were trying to outdo each other with childhood memories about surviving his impetuous temper—made doubly so by my father’s Aries Sun and Leo ascendant.

I said, “Remember the Christmas when Dad was drunk and chasing your mom, and he ran straight through the neighbor’s plate glass window?”

“Or that time he cut off the tip of his thumb with a table saw?”

We recounted one tale after another and then, exhausted, drove back to my brother’s to show his wife and kids the dad bag.

Like most Aries-Leo folks, my father was keenly stylish and always dressed to make an impression. That my dad would exit life in a shopping bag for an off-price retail chain, a store he’d never be caught dead in, was, well…another kind of perfection. Death is the great equalizer.

Back at my brother’s house, my niece wondered about how someone could extract the gold contained in her grandfather’s dental work. I suggested there was probably a YouTube video for that, and my brother interrupted with, “Don’t. Even.”

That night, on my back and exhausted on the couch, the full impact of my father’s death broke through the barrier that buffers the living from acknowledging mortality. One of those 3 A.M. invasions that you’d rather sleep through.

Sensing my body, it felt as though an entire hemisphere in my head was missing. And I realized at that moment that my father’s presence, throughout my life, was directly associated with that particular sense of headspace. And I guessed that my mother must have comprised the opposite hemisphere. With my father’s disappearance, so too went a particular somatic awareness of myself. Where had half of my crown gone to? More to the point, where had my father gone to?

I’d abandoned my Catholic doctrine of heaven and hell right after high school, and my reflection on reincarnation—throughout my 30s—was a peer-influenced fancy. In my 40s a brief dalliance with Nietzsche’s theory of recurrence unnerved me to the point of abandoning my inquiries into immortality entirely. I settled on an agnostic position, and I’d argue with anyone broadcasting their post-mortality beliefs with, “Who says?”

But when a mother or father goes missing, those beliefs and rationales loom back on their own. I think because when a parent dies, the fact of their non-existence shoves their progeny one step forward on the plank of life, a plank that oversees an oceanic void.

And so, lying on the couch that night, I considered and negated the list once again: Heaven? No. Hell? No. Reincarnation? No. Recurrence? Please, no! Total absence? Like when I’m deep asleep and have no clue as to my existence. Yes, very likely. But again, no definitive knowing-in-the-bones assurance.

After I’d systematically canceled each solution, an eerie void emerged, a core-deep blankness that felt alien and familiar. Each of us seems to live with this void as a companion throughout our lives, but always at a distance. Should we get too close for any duration, the sense becomes untenable. I suppose this is why certain schools of Buddhism make a lifelong practice of attempting to allow for this unnamable version of non-reality.

Another ten years passed until my stepmom, my brother’s mother, died, and I drove down to Portland to help him with the cremation arrangements.

Again, at another coffee shop, I told my brother that because we saw each other so infrequently, the chances were good that our final meeting would involve one of us retrieving the other’s ashes from a mortuary.

And then, reading each other’s minds, we blurted, “And don’t forget the Ross Dress For Less!”

Love,

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Remembering My Dad (and Ross Dress for Less)

On his birthday (and on his death day)—here's my final takeaway.

Opening photo by Patricia Woodruff, c. 1953 • Bicycle photo (my dad and me), c. 1960 by Reid Miles, ©2026 by Nightcharm, Inc.

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