The one thing no one tells you is how much human ashes weigh.
The first night I was with Dad in Ulverstone, we were seated at the dining table after dinner. I don't remember if we were talking about Mum at the time or something completely unrelated, but seemingly out of the blue, Dad said something like, "I have something new to show you, but it's maybe not the right time."
I didn't know what he might mean, so I responded that now I was worried.
He said it was on the piano, it was Mum's ashes, and he wandered off to get them.
At the time, even if we'd been talking about Mum, it felt a little out of left field, and I'd not been thinking about such things, so it was a bit of a shock to my system.
He returned with a navy blue presentation box. Inside was a plastic container like those you'd use for protein powder. There's no better way to describe it.
There was also a plaque that might have been suitable to affix to a cremation plot in a cemetery, but it was light. And, for some reason, Hyde was engraved with a lowercase 'h'. (I can't help it, I always spot those details).
None of these things mattered because we knew we would scatter her ashes. So, the only thing that mattered was having her ashes.
Not the receptacle that contained them or the never-to-be-used plaque.
Dad handed me the box. The first thing that hit me was how heavy she was.
That immediately brought home how real this was.
The soul may weigh only 21 grams*, but the ashes of human remains are much heavier than I would ever have imagined.
The realisation made me quite emotional, and I admit, I was a little in shock. The wine we had with dinner and the ciders I'd had probably didn't help.
I sat at the table with Dad and Mum and let the emotion wash over me. The idea sink in. I handled the container, felt its weight in my hands and made some flippant joke that no one would ever have thought Mum would fit in a box that small.
Later in the week, before my brothers arrived, I made time to play the piano for Mum one last time.
It was terrible. I hadn't played since October 2019, and though I thought I played surprisingly well then after an excessively long break, I was seriously struggling to identify the right notes this time. What had previously come back to me, like riding a bike, felt almost alien.
I think that was the first time I appreciated how much I had previously learned. Like learning a foreign language and then realising how hard it must have been to pick up when you lose the words through lack of practice.
I would go through moments when everything flowed through my fingers, and then a bar or two would completely throw me off. I swore. A lot.
But I wanted to play to Mum that last time because she played a large part in my learning piano in the first place and would often ask me to play while she prepared dinner or did some other chore around the house all through my time growing up and when I lived with my parents on and off as an adult. She didn't mind what I played. She just loved to listen to me play.
Before I played to her, my curiosity was too much. So, while alone, I took Dad's kitchen scale to the dining table. I placed Mum's ashes on it and took this photo. I presumed the container probably weighed less than a kilogram, so her ashes weighed about 2kg.
I contemplated keeping some of her ashes. I thought about bringing them back to London with me.
Some companies claim to be able to make diamonds from human ashes and/or hair. That appealed to me as diamonds are my birthstone.
But in the end, the sceptic in me researched such claims and couldn't verify them, and the process would have been hugely expensive, so I decided I would rather all of her be scattered together.