Today was a day I have been dreading. The phone call itself was unremarkable, practical in tone, but its meaning arrived whole: it was time to pick up my grandmother’s ashes. Holding the box was harder than I expected. It was light, so very light, and that smallness carried its own violence. This was all that remained of her physical body, the last material trace of a life that once filled rooms, shaped habits, and anchored a family. The reduction was startling, not because it felt disrespectful, but because it was so honest. There was no illusion left to negotiate with.
Cremation has a particular clarity. The body is not preserved, not aestheticized, not softened into symbol. It is dismantled. Nothing of her remains organically intact. What is left is carbon, ash, dust. Strangely, this knowledge did not hollow the moment; it steadied it. I found myself leaning into an understanding of religion not as belief, but as art, as a language humans developed to speak accurately about experiences too large to manage otherwise. “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19, KJV) is not a threat or a punishment so much as a recognition of what is. It names reality without flinching.
Here, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” ceases to be a promise of transcendence and becomes a poetic articulation of material truth. Matter does not vanish. It changes. Death does not interrupt life; it feeds it. Carbon recycles itself endlessly as the basic architecture of living things. Soil becomes leaf. Leaf becomes body. Body becomes ash. The cycle closes and opens again without spectacle or permission. As Ecclesiastes observes with unsentimental precision, “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3:20, KJV). The verse does not console, but it coheres.
This understanding shifts death from negation to participation. Life is not sustained despite death, but because of it. What we call decay is not failure; it is function. Meaning does not require escape from finitude, only attention to continuity. In this sense, religious language survives belief because it is often truer than belief. It is closer to observation than doctrine.
The Buddha’s image of roses growing from rubbish names the same truth from another cultural grammar. Growth does not require purity; it requires conditions. Decay is not the opposite of life; it is its ground. When I think of my grandmother now, I do not imagine her elsewhere. I imagine her redistributed. I imagine her matter returning to the system that once sustained her, her influence persisting not as presence but as condition.
Wiwi Schroeder’s Adolescence gives visual form to this understanding. A young girl sits in profile, her face obscured by a potted rose bush held close to her body. The longer I sit with the painting, the clearer it becomes that the girl and the rose are not separate subjects placed in relation to one another. They form a single system. The plant depends on the girl for support; the girl’s identity is overtaken by growth. Her face is not erased, but replaced. What defines her is not expression, but care.
The eye moves through the painting in a loop: from her bowed head into the blossoms, down the stems, into the soil, and back through her arms and posture. There is no exit point. This closed visual cycle mirrors the one now occupying my thoughts. Matter changes form. Identity shifts location. Nothing disappears; it reorganizes itself. Adolescence, here, is not a stage one passes through and leaves behind, but a condition of becoming: unfinished, provisional, and relational.
What strikes me most is the way the girl holds the rose. There is no display, no offering outward. Her posture is protective, inward, almost reverent. This gesture echoes my own experience of carrying the box of ashes. Both acts involve holding something that no longer gives anything back. Care persists without reciprocity. Responsibility remains even when relationship has changed irreversibly. Grief, then, is not clinging to what is gone, but acknowledging continued participation in a system shaped by that loss.
The obscured face in the painting introduces another truth that religious imagery has long understood: not everything meaningful is meant to be seen clearly. The sacred is often veiled. Moses hides his face. The cloud fills the tabernacle. Even Paul reaches for agricultural metaphor rather than explanation: “That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die” (1 Corinthians 15:36, KJV). The verse is often read eschatologically, but its power lies in its material insight. What returns is not the same form, but the same substance, rearranged.
My grandmother’s absence now feels similar. She is no longer accessible in the way she once was, yet her absence is not empty. It has shape. It has weight. It has consequence. Like the hidden face in the painting, what has withdrawn remains real.
In both the ritual of collecting her ashes and the quiet logic of Adolescence, I am confronted with the same truth: life and death are not opposites. They are co-constitutive. The rose grows because something else has already returned to the soil. Adolescence unfolds because childhood dissolves into it. Carbon circulates. Meaning circulates. Endings are rarely endings; they are redistributions within a closed system.
Religion, art, and philosophy converge here not as competing explanations, but as layered ways of bearing witness. Science tells me how matter changes. Philosophy helps me understand what it means to live inside that change. Religion, understood as art, gives me images sturdy enough to hold it without denial. Together, they allow me to say something simple without it being small: life is life. It changes form. It asks not for belief, but for attention.
Holding my grandmother’s ashes, looking again at the girl and the rose, I do not feel the need for resolution. I feel the weight of continuity. She has taken the next step in the cycle, and I remain within it. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. It changes. And in that change, meaning does not vanish, but rearranges itself, quietly insisting on care.