Ashes to ashes

This is the first of two parts

"Are those Mike's ashes?" Brett asked glancing at an urn on a table in the front of the small chapel.

"Yeah, I suppose they are," I replied.

We were alone in the chapel following the saying of the Rosary. Everyone else had gone to a nearby room in the funeral home for the wake.

"You know, there's nothing to keep us from taking them," Brett mused out loud.

Nothing but strict laws against ghoulish behavior and the code of basic human decency, I thought. I wasn't sure where he was going with this, and he must have seen my growing look of alarm, so Brett quickly explained his thinking.

"Look, Mike was never married so there's no wife or children to keep his ashes. The two things he loved most in life were Sigma Pi and the Georgia Bulldogs. Wouldn't it be great if some of us met up and scattered his ashes at the fifty yard line of Samford Stadium in the dead of night? It would be the perfect tribute. He would love it."

That's how these things always started at the Sigma Pi house. Someone hatched a harebrained scheme. Then one thing led to another, and, the next thing you know, the police and fire department were on the way. Suddenly, I was twenty again.

I had to admit, Brett's idea was appealing, and we spent the next few minutes germinating a plan. First, we agreed that we'd approach the family with our idea when the time was right. Then we went to work on the details.

We've all come a long way in the nearly thirty years since we passed through the University of Georgia. Then we were a tiny collection of misfits. Until my senior year the national organization would only allow us to exist as a colony--our band was too small and a little too weird to be given full chapter status.

Today we're teachers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, college professors, beaureaucrats and at least one writer. Brett is a prosecuting attorney somewhere in Georgia. Mike, the man whose mortal remains were in question, was a microbiologist before passing away at age 50 from a sudden heart attack on the day after Christmas.

I was all for a group of us breaking and entering the stadium in the dead of night and holding a small ceremony. The illicit plan felt "right" to me. Brett has a job where it is impolitic to risk arrest, so he had an alternate idea. He suggested going through channels to get the official blessing of the university. Brett's method would be easier. Mike left a chunk of his estate to the university, and those of us still living are connected enough or donate enough to the school that I'm sure UGA officials could be convinced to look the other way for a few minutes.

I continued to lobby for the burglary option. "I'll even do it myself," I said. "If a prosecuting attorney gets arrested that's a problem, but if I got arrested, it would be great new material for me," I enthused.

A few minutes later we rejoined the other mourners at the wake and Brett and I found ourselves talking to Mike's sisters Susan and Mary Beth.

"Hank and I have been talking about a great idea we have," Brett said, unable to contain himself and giving me undeserved credit for the plot.

"Which we agreed we would raise at the appropriate time," I interjected with a warning glance, before rapidly changing the subject.

"Okay, what's this all about?" Mary Beth asked me a while later after cornering me.

I took a deep breath and told her.

To my surprise, she was delighted with the idea and said that several family members had already thought of a virtually identical plan for a portion of Mike's remains. "My only request is that the family gets a video."

No problem.

Now what?