Buying a Baby Urn

I want to just go ahead and be super up front about what this entry is about. So there you go. If you don’t want to think about the volume of an unborn baby’s cremated remains or the container to put a child in, welcome to the club.

It’s been over a year since my son died. I was 21 weeks pregnant. We had him cremated and I received his ashes in the mail not long after. While I type this, my eyes are drawn to the hidden place I’m holding him. He currently resides in a small plastic bag, its volume can’t be more than a thimble. This bag is in the “temporary” plastic box from the funeral home, inside a cardboard memento box, inside a decorative basket, tucked on an upper shelf of my living room book case. Finding a final resting place for him has been a task so heavy that each time I try to lift it and pick up where I left off, I’m starting over.

There are what my husband jokingly calls, “party urns.” These are decorative pieces, usually thematic in nature. When a loved one you had the opportunity to know dies, maybe there’s a theme that reminds you of them. There are occupational urns, animal lover urns, sports fanatic urns…but what do you get to contain a child that you wanted so very much to know and to hold, but never did? Everett wasn’t a firefighter, a dolphin enthusiast, or a fan of the Green Bay Packers. So…let’s just skip all that and look at the infant urns. Most of the baby urns are so cliché. I didn’t know what I expected the first time I googled but you’ll find containers shaped as or decorated with blocks, booties, bottles, pacifiers, and LOTS of angel wings. Butterflies, birds, and other symbols of hope are also prevalent. They all feel wrong to me. I’m not as overtly religious as I once was and the whole experience with my son has made me question the presence or involvement of a god even further. Angel wings don’t feel right. He never lived in our world so none of these childhood-themed pieces are of interest to me. They feel silly and sad. Why would I put the entirety of my son inside a ceramic baby bootie? It makes me sick to my stomach.

I guess it’s just going to be sad because like, it is. It’s really sad. It is really, really, REALLY fucking sad. It is the saddest and worst thing that has happened to me (so far). So UGH okay let’s put aside the “party urns” and move to more basic pieces. Well, now we have to consider the volume of ashes since we’re outside of the infant category. Urn volume is frequently measured by cubic inches and in my research, I’ve learned that one cubic inch is roughly equivalent to one pound of human body weight. So if you weighed 200 lbs at your time of death and your cremains were to be stored in a single urn, you would need an urn with a capacity of at least 200 cubic inches. Okay, so, like, I don’t know exactly the weight of my son at the time of my loss. However, I was 21 weeks pregnant and he was approximately two weeks behind, gestationally. So at 19 weeks the average pregnancy is still under one pound and I will say, I believe his ashes would fit in a 1 cubic inch container.

But like, shit, man. 1 inch is nothing. That is TINY. Smaller than he would’ve been at the time, physically. Even though he was tiny, I don’t want to squint my eyes to see his urn and be reminded of how ultimately tiny he was. I don’t even know if they sell urns that small. Something about the overwhelming smallness crushes me. So…let’s move on and just find something we like the shape of and that’s big enough to be engraved. Engraving seems like an appropriate way to personalize. We’ll just go from there. But then my mind starts to wander…do I cut the bag open and dust his ashes into the bottom of a 40 cubic inch urn, where they don’t even cover the bottom in a single layer? Or do I just toss the bag in there? What of the rest of the space? What if I decide I hate that urn and I want to relocate his ashes later? It makes me feel so lonely for him, just thinking about his remains in such an unnecessarily large container. I’m feeling like a depressed Goldilocks, I can’t find the one that’s “just right.”

So I can’t stand looking at all these “normal people” urns for like, humans that actually had an opportunity to live in our world. So back to googling the infant urns. Another popular option is a teddy bear with a pocket to put the ashes in. That just seems weird to me. Like any child growing up in the 90’s, I watched Toy Story and secretly peeped in on episodes of The Outer Limits my parents watched. Stuffed animals coming to life was simultaneously a dream and a nightmare that I thought of regularly. To have my sons ashes stored inside of a teddy bear that has literally no meaning to him or to me feels absurd. One of the things in his memory box is a teddy bear we received from the staff at the clinic. Its creepy little bug eyes remind me of a bootleg version of Ty’s newish creation, (which I had to google the name of,) “Beanie Boos.” I keep it in his box because it’s not like there’s much in there for him, we never had the chance to know him. He never had a chance to live in this world and express interest in a certain stuffed animal, preference to a blanket, or even have an associated color scheme.

It’s so important to me, as we await the arrival of our daughter, that we have my son’s remains sorted. That we have some sort of established memorial place or feature for him. In the midst of a global pandemic, it’s become even more difficult to work on this immense project. I wanted to have the hallway painted, footprints framed, a plaque or something engraved. All of this feels put on hold and all I want is to get my son out of a plastic box in a box in a basket. I want him to have a place inside of my home, his home, our home. I want his sister to grow up knowing him and seeing what we do have of him.

Even though it’s not an urn, I’ve ordered a piece from Etsy that is also undoubtedly small. We will see how big it is when it arrives next week. It’s technically a trinket holder for rings and things but I think his bag of ashes will fit. It’s a handcrafted, retro style rocket ship on top of a moon. Everett’s nursery was to be in a mid-century robot/rocket style and it’s the first piece that’s spoken to me. I never got to make his nursery, for better or worse, but I had many things picked out and vision of what it would look like. After many days of leaving the tab open, I finally bought it. I can make a small velvet bag to put the plastic bag in and then store it in there. Maybe I can order a stand to put it on that we can place his name and birth/death day on to make it a clearer memorial piece. I know my husband will consider it a “party urn” but it’s the first one that’s felt like it could represent my son. I hope he exists, somewhere over the moon, watching over our family.

Always,
Anya