Hope springs eternal for Michelle's ashes
The ashes should not have been there, abandoned in a building slated for demolition. But a man who discovered the urn on a dark and rainy night was determined to find dignity for the remains, which belonged to a woman with a big heart who lived an often p
ALL DAY A COLD RAIN FELL, until water dripped through the ceiling and flooded the unit, which had no power, home only to ghosts and the remains of lives on the edge.
It blended into the darkness, the vaselike container, with its black top and base and pattern of long narrow lines resembling fingers clutching it.
She shouldn’t have been there, not anymore, in a building on the brink of demolition, among boxes and plastic bags and chairs and sofas and Walmart flyers and crutches and half-empty pop bottles.
A white beam of light, a green-gold flash, and in a glimpse it came to life: a nature scene on the container, the lines in fact cattails standing tall against a blue sky.
Not everyone would know what it was, but the guy holding the flashlight did. An urn. His heart sank. He carried it into the cold wet January night. It was just after 6 p.m., the days short but getting brighter one minute at a time.
Hey I’m back from the dead.
She typed the post on her Facebook page.
“When I die, I want my ashes brought out here”
THIS WAS SEVEN springs ago. It was just an expression, and typical of Michelle Oerlemans’ shoot-from-the-hip style. But it was also more.
She loved family and friends, but it was like — it was like, her father said, she was an island unto herself.
She would disappear for months at a time even though she was always here, in Hamilton.
She did venture, once, to the West Coast, after getting married in the early 1990s. She lived there briefly with her husband, Chris, and their daughter in Surrey, B.C., where he found a job working construction. A second child, a boy, was conceived out there.
But those few years stand as the exception in Michelle’s life, a postcard of possibilities and mountains and sandy beaches at nearby White Rock on a half-moon bay.
“When I die,” she said, “I want my ashes brought out here.”
The man who found the urn took it to a funeral home but it was not theirs. They gave him a burgundy velvet bag to carry it in, and he continued his quest to find the person and dignity for their remains.
His name is Graham Cubitt and he works for a nonprofit charity called Indwell, which so far has renovated nine buildings in the city and turned them into affordable housing.
That’s why he was there that night, investigating flooding in the beaten-down white-brick building Indwell had just bought on Melvin Avenue at Parkdale, a block south of Barton Street East.
Long ago, it was home to a popular blue-collar tavern and banquet hall called George and Mary’s, but in recent years occupied by tenants living with poverty and other demons.
He carried the velvet bag into City Hall. They didn’t know what to do. Take it to the police? It was not a police matter; he had not found missing human remains; the person had been properly cremated.
Indwell is a Christian-based enterprise and faith is his guiding light. As Easter week approached, the task grew in importance.
“It is the season of the Resurrection,” he said. “One of our core values is hope … If the ashes in that urn were me, or a family member, I’d appreciate someone treating it with respect.”
He took it to a local priest, who handed it off to Ross Hutchinson, who oversees cremation at Holy Cross Cemetery in Paris, and who in his 30 years in the business had heard of an urn abandoned only a couple of times.
Once, a family moved into a home and discovered an urn holding a child’s ashes.
Most who cremate loved ones bury the ashes, or find a way to scatter them in a river or ocean, at a golf course, in some cases even at Fort Erie Race Track, at the finish line.
He opened the urn and looked for the stainless steel tag with a name on it. Thanks to everyone who posted happy birthday to me, you guys really made my day. Love you all xoxo It was Michelle’s birthday, Dec. 17, 2012.
A GOOD DAY; she got to spend time with her son and daughter.
Life was difficult. She went through long stretches where she didn’t see her kids, or grandson, “the most beautiful grandbaby in the world,” who she had full custody of at one point. I spent Christmas alone this year very depressing. oh well
SHE AND HER HUSBAND had long ago split up. They met in their teens in the 1980s, bonding over a shared love of heavy metal music offering anthems to love and loss and stomping your troubles into dust.
Michelle had long red hair and blue-green eyes and wasn’t afraid to say what she thought.
She had a big heart, loved being around people, yet at the same time could be unsure of herself and only want to be alone.
She grew up with her younger brother, Chipper, in a little brown house on Canada Street, where each summer neighbours organized a Canada Day street party: flags, painted faces, hotdogs and cake and a tricycle parade.
She was bused up the Mountain to Caledon high school, all-girls at the time, but dropped out. She spent a few months living with an aunt and uncle.
No one writes their own story, not entirely. Michelle Oerlemans had family who struggled. She made choices, but was also chosen, a dark road to the wrong people available.
In the early 2000s she had a cancer diagnosis but bounced back from it.
She didn’t have regular work, but landed a telemarketing job.
Start my new job tomorrow. Yeah!! More money, good money 15 bucks an hour!
MOMENTS with her kids were the greatest times of her life, nothing came close to the passion she felt for them.
Poor health, and drug addiction, transformed her, but at her best, when Michelle entered a room, she was it, she had a beautiful presence. The Leafs play tonight. Go Leafs Go!! She wrote the post as the new year dawned in 2013.
Freezing rain peppered the city, her world enveloped in a cold fog
SHE ENJOYED wearing her blue and white Toronto Maple Leafs sweater.
Michelle’s son lived with his father but her daughter chose to stay with her, and that was not a good thing for the daughter, not there.
They were entombed in a beaten-down apartment where Michelle was drawn to broken people she wanted to help, even though she desperately needed it herself.
Graham Cubitt heard it through the grapevine: the ashes in the urn had a name.
The woman named Michelle Oerlemans had been lost, but now her ashes were found. He felt good about that.
The man she had last lived with was listed as the next of kin with the funeral home that handled the cremation.
He was also likely the one who left the urn behind when he vacated the building. He did not return calls from the funeral home.
At least the urn, which had been a day or so away from ending up in a dumpster or pulverized in demolition, was safe.
Her father, Benny, was outraged, hated the thought that someone didn’t care enough to take care of the ashes.
On the bright side, he wants to thank the man who rescued the urn. Someone did care.
But it brought it all back, memories, pain and loss that good friends help him keep at bay during the day, but which haunt him at night — of Michelle, and his son Chipper, who was taken away by illness at just 43.
The funeral home will work out arrangements with the family for the urn.
Benny wants to bury the ashes with his parents in Holy Sepulchre Catholic Cemetery. Michelle’s son, in his early 20s, wants to fly it out west.
Maybe that’s where the remnants of her bodily life will rest, in an ocean or bay, carried on currents toward a mist-soaked horizon like a waiting dream. Well I have breast cancer isn’t this just great here we go again Her last post, May 10, 2013.
THEY TOLD HER she had the disease the last five years. She was stage four.
The next day, Michelle wrote a friend; they should watch the Leafs game.
That December, she received happy 45th birthday wishes on her page. She did not reply.
Less than a week later, a Sunday morning, freezing rain peppered the city, her world enveloped in a cold fog.
That’s when she died, three days before Christmas, her son and daughter at her bedside.
It wasn’t long before that when she had summoned the will to leave the hospital to be at home one last stretch. Perhaps it had felt nicely defiant. Back from the dead.
That’s when she saw her younger cousin, Tanya, on the Barton Street bus.
She looked into her cousin’s eyes, which resembled her own blue-greens. “I don’t have much longer to live,” she said. Michelle was weak, could barely talk. But she had the power to remember. And to write the ending. “Don’t forget the good times we had. And always remember me from what you know.”