“Ashes” follows 35-year-old Chris as he accompanies his mother to scatter his recently deceased father’s ashes on a lake—the same lake where Chris camped with his father as a child. On the way there, Chris is annoyed by his mother’s attempts to sugarcoat and idealize both her marriage and Chris’s relationship with his father. In contrast to his mother, he reflects on times throughout his life when his parents failed to support or celebrate him for who he is. This difference in perception, the story suggests, is due to the fact that Chris and his parents have never been able to communicate with each other truthfully. This is why, for instance, Chris and his mother see the past so differently—and both of them remain stuck in their perceptions of the past, rather than actually trying to talk about and solve their problems. With this, “Ashes” shows that a lack of open, honest communication can create misunderstanding and resentment that erodes relationships over time.
Throughout Chris’s life, his family’s interactions have been defined by staying silent and holding back, even when they have important things to say. For instance, Chris (who’s gay) recalls that his parents never broached the question of Chris’s sexuality with him, even though they suspected he was gay since he was a young child. Instead, he could only understand that “there was something deeply dissatisfying about him, something that baffled his father and pinned a strained, mortified smile on his mother’s face.” He notes that “Neither of them [...] had any idea how to name what the thing was.” By refusing to raise the subject, Chris’s parents inadvertently taught him that his sexuality is something to be ashamed of and something to stay quiet about. But by mirroring his parents’ tendency to brush issues under the rug, Chris ends up creating more strain on his relationship with his parents. For instance, at the end of his final camping trip with his father, his father good-naturedly asked Chris if he agreed that the lake was a beautiful place to camp. Rather than take this easy opening and opportunity to connect with his father, Chris just shrugged—and at the time, he took pleasure in making his dad feel bad. But decades later, in the present, he regrets his silence: answering his father’s question may have been a way to spark a closer relationship and build up some level of trust. Insisting on silence, “Ashes” shows, means that people (even family members) never really get to know each other.
Further, “Ashes” shows that that without communication, people become stuck in their preconceptions and struggle to reevaluate their views in light of new information. The clearest example of this is Chris’s secrecy about his sexuality. Importantly, the story never reveals just how much Chris’s mother knows about her son’s sexuality. Chris’s father knew his son was gay and was disapproving and unsupportive the one time they spoke about it, but Chris’s mother seems to only have acted embarrassed of Chris when he was a child. Now that Chris is an adult, she openly hopes that he’ll marry a woman and father children. Chris finds this grating and offensive, yet he chooses not to set his mother straight about his sexuality and tempering her expectations. And while he seems to imply that he expects her to react poorly if he were to tell her the truth, all of his mother’s worst offenses are committed in Chris’s imagination, not in real life. For instance, Chris believes that before long, his mother is going to try to convince him to stay the night in his childhood room by noting that he doesn’t have a wife and kids to get home to. In this way, the lack of communication between Chris and his mother makes him stuck in his perception of her, just as he believes she’s stuck in her disapproval of him. Furthermore, Chris’s father’s dying words to his son were a warning that Chris’s mother would die if Chris “threw” his sexuality in her face. Yet Chris admits that this final warning reflects his father’s homophobia, not his mother’s. When considered alongside Chris’s imaginings of his mother’s rudeness, both Chris and his father seem to be set in their preconceptions about Chris’s mother. A lack of openness, this shows, only reinforces people’s misguided perceptions of one another and stunts relationships from developing further.
The only way to remedy the situation, “Ashes” suggests, is to take small steps toward communicating openly, while also being mindful of the ways a lifetime of silence has molded the family. Indeed, the story ends on a hopeful note when, after finally accepting his role in keeping his father at a distance, Chris takes active steps to close that distance with his mother. His internal monologue shifts—no longer does he think about his mother rambling on about untrue things. Instead, he agrees without scorn or sarcasm to do what he can to help his mother purchase tokens of thanks for her friends on their way back from scattering this father’s ashes, and he even tenderly brushes some ash off of her jacket without interrupting her chatter. With this, “Ashes” shows that it’s possible to improve difficult, unhealthy relationships if a person is willing to give others the benefit of the doubt, recognize one’s own responsibility for the poor relationship, and treat others with kindness and compassion.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Communication and Misunderstanding ThemeTracker
Communication and Misunderstanding Quotes in Ashes
“Here, here,” his mother had remonstrated. “At my feet.”
Where else? he’d thought sourly, finding the right key for the ignition, as the lifetime habit of keeping his responses to himself closed his mouth in a firm and well-worn line. A line that suggested nothing, broached nothing, gave nothing away.
His father’s car has some kind of cruse-control check that beeps at him every time he inadvertently goes above the set limit, and he keeps jumping when he hears it, feeling a ludicrous amount of guilt.
“I told Shirley, that’s where he’d rather be laid to rest, in the place where he shared such precious times with his son. He had lots of happy memories of all those fishing trips.”
All those fishing trips. They’d been twice. Once at the Easter break, and once for the first week of the September school holidays. After that his father had given up. Both trips are still etched vividly in Chris’s mind, like so many of the powerless indignities of childhood.
His father’s forced cheeriness slowly evaporating into his usual taciturnity as he got tired of trying. Chris coughing into the acrid smoke. Trying not to move too much in the stuffy sleeping bag at night. Then the packing of the car on the last day, the esky empty and leaking melted ice, and his obscure sense that he’d failed some test.
It was Scott who’d moved on, though. Chris had been going to introduce him to his parents, he just had to wait for the right moment, he’d told Scott in increasing tones of self-recrimination. It wasn’t as if he was ashamed of him, God no. But he’d gone anyway.
“You obviously... you’ve got to live the way you see fit.” He was whispering. Every word like a pulling stitch as he panted slightly, eyes shut tight against the possibility of looking his son in the eye. “But there’s no need to... well...throw it in her face. It would kill her.”
Spending his last hours worrying about her. It had killed him, not her. He’d taken that tiny admission, heavy and impervious as a lead sinker, and clung on to its icy weight all the way down to the depths.
It’s nauseating, this revisionism; it infuriates him. This, he thinks savagely, this is the best she can summon: the two of them travelling alone to enact a ceremony in the presence of no lifelong friends, no neighbours who care enough, no extended family, in a place whose symbolism is wholly an invention. This is the reality, he imagines saying to her, just you and me, your 35-year-old son who you cast as the perennial bachelor, this pitiful pilgrimage I can’t wait to be finished with.
Soon she won’t camouflage her disappointment so well, and then she’ll raise the stakes. “I don’t understand why you can’t just stay,” she’ll say petulantly. “I know you’ll think I’m stupid but I feel nervous here alone in the house at night.” She will pause, he is certain, and then add, “And it’s not as if you’ve got a wife and children at home waiting, is it?”
Chris imagines her looking in the mirror that morning, trying the scarf on, lifting her chin in that way she has, every small decision an aching effort. He wishes he’d told her she looked nice, when he’d arrived at her door. Her expression as she faces the camera, obedient and tremulous and trying not to blink, makes his throat feel tight; there is a stinging behind his eyes.
“You,” is all she says.
No possibility that Chris might be permitted to feel the same violent shirking resistance, no likelihood that he will just be able to stand upend the box and shake the contents into the water without touching them. No. Now that push has come to shove, it’s going to be him.
His father had trodden the coals down, crushing them neatly, scattered some soil over the top just like Chris is scattering the contents of the box now over the water. Small handfuls. That smell of wet ash, and the cicadas beating like the ticking of a clock, and his father giving the site one last glance around and saying, “Great spot anyway, don’t you reckon, Chris?”
Why hadn’t he answered with enthusiastic assent? What would it have cost him to give his father that, instead of a shrug, just for the small mean pleasure of feeling his father turn away, defeated?
Chris thinks they can probably get back there by 4.30. As he nods and agrees what a nice gesture it would be, he sees a small smear of ash on the lapel of her jacket, and absently, tenderly, without interrupting her, he brushes it off.
