Cementing Our Lives

“What is a kiss?  Why this, as some approve:
The sure, sweet cement, glue and lime of love.”

Robert Herrick, poet and clergyman (1591-1674)

“The feeling of having shared in a common peril is one element in the powerful cement which binds us together.”
Bill Wilson, Alcoholics Anonymous founder, (1895-1971)

Cement comes in heavy bags of a dry chunky powder: a mix of calcium, lime and clay.  I’ve hauled those 60 lb bags in from the car, plopped them into the mixing trough, and broken open the bag with a shovel.  I’m anticipating setting a post, a strong base to last for years.  But I must be careful with cement; it sets fast and it seems a bit poisonous.  Just opening the bag, a toxic smoke rises up that you don’t want to breath too close, nor touch, like it would sting or burn. 

Actually, what I buy is Ready-mix, which is cement already mixed in with various aggregates - gravel and sand.  You stir water into that mix, and you get concrete.  Strictly speaking, cement, the calciumed lime and clay is just the glue.  The final goop, with the added aggregate and the water, is the concrete.

Cement makes things strong and hard, but it’s a little dangerous.  Once you’ve poured the cement, there’s no going back.  Just ask the hapless victims of gangsters , their feet encased in cement and then pushed off a deserted pier, to sleep with the fishes.  Somehow I associate cement with death.  Just keep reading…..

Cementing a relationship, or a deal, has always seemed an odd metaphor to me. I understand the value of glue, bonding and binding.  But I can’t help thinking of the toxic smell and the hard permanence you can crack your head on. When I kiss my beloved I don’t, like poet Herrick, call it a sweet cement.  In a 12-step meeting I feel more that I am linked arm in arm with others, not cemented, immobilized and hard. 

This may be a dilemma of the modern age, to associate cement with dangerous chemicals, and to think that being cemented to others is just a little too constricting.    Maybe in Herrick’s day, even Wilson’s, cement meant something more like Elmer’s Glue, pliable and non-toxic and fun.

A different, more positive way to use cement as a metaphor might be to compare it to our bones.  If our bodies are like buildings, then bones are the foundations and the pillars,  bound together with cement.  Actually both cement and bones are calcium based, and they hold our buildings and our bodies vertical, strong and connected.  Like cement, our bones start off soft and pliable, then harden and strengthen with age.

If you’ve ever scattered the ashes of a loved one after death, you’ve seen the similarity, when life has ended, between bones and cement.  The texture of “cremains,” the remains of your loved one that the crematorium delivers to you, is eerily like that sack of dry rough concrete powder and gravel, some little chunks of the mineral-based bone, similar grayish white color.  It’s like a little box of dry cement.

I know that the texture feels like cement, because I have held a lot of cremains in my hands, even mixed and poured them.  At one church I served we had a memorial garden where we placed human ashes.  Part of my job was to take the remains out of the box from the crematorium, and put them in a brown paper bag, a sandwich bag, which would decompose eventually.  Then I would use a post-hole digger to dig a hole a foot deep or so, and put the full sandwich bag in the hole.  It was at once a very practical and very spiritual kind of job, often done alone.  We had a lunch program at that church and I’d use sandwich bags from their stash; it sort of felt like giving the earth some nourishment.

One year a beloved church member Bill Mudd died, and his wife Joanne gave me his cremains in the box from the mortuary to keep in my office; she was too sad to have them at home.  But she made me promise that when she died I would mix their ashes together and place them together in the garden.  Bill kept me company in his box for several years on a bookshelf in my office, but the day came with it was time to mix in Joanne.  Back down to the church kitchen.  With a mixing bowl I combined the two sets of cremains,  barehanded.  Then I found one bigger sandwich bag, dug one bigger hole.  Reunited, cemented together, in death.

The slang phrase that builders use for cement is “mud.”  Bill and Joanne Mudd, after decades of the sweet cement of shared peril and kisses, were bound and bonded together one last time, in the church kitchen and church garden.  Two strong and tough people, a strong and lasting marriage.  Like cement.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter