My brother and I divided our mother's ashes in 2018 and we have not spoken since the funeral home parking lot.

We're fifty-four and fifty-one. One sister, who lives in Oregon and who will not take a side, which is the correct decision and which I resent.

How this happened, because everyone assumes it was a fight and it was almost the opposite.

My mother died in March 2018. Pancreatic, eleven weeks from diagnosis. She had no will — she had about nineteen thousand dollars and a condo with a mortgage, so there was nothing much to fight over and we didn't fight over it.

What she did have was a wish, stated to both of us separately, that she be scattered at a lake in Michigan where her parents had a cabin until 1981.

And my brother wanted to do it that summer. And I wanted to wait a year.

That's it. That's the whole disagreement. He wanted July 2018. I wanted July 2019, because my daughter was finishing a program abroad and would not be back until September, and my mother had helped raise that kid, and I was not going to scatter my mother without her granddaughter present.

Both positions are defensible. I want to be fair here: his position was that my mother said "that summer," and she did say that, and he was honoring it literally. My position was that she'd want everyone there, and she would have.

We had the conversation three times. The third time was in the funeral home parking lot, after we picked up the urn, and we were both forty-eight hours of no sleep and we were in a Buick with a box between us.

And my brother said: "Fine. We'll split her."

And we did. We went inside and we asked, and the funeral director — who I will say was the single most professional human being I have ever encountered — explained that this is common, and brought out two smaller containers, and did it in a back room, and gave us each a receipt.

A receipt.

He scattered his half in July 2018. I scattered mine in July 2019, with my daughter, at the same lake, four hundred yards from where he did his, and neither of us knows exactly where the other one stood.

Seven years. We have not spoken. Not one call. He sends my wife a Christmas card every year — my wife, not me, and she responds, and I have never asked her not to.

And here's the part I came here to write, which I have not said to my sister or my wife or anybody.

I was wrong.

Not about waiting — I'd still wait. I was wrong in the parking lot. When he said "we'll split her," the correct response from a fifty-year-old man was to say, "No. Let's sit down." And what I said was, "Okay."

I said okay in about one second. Because I was exhausted and because some part of me wanted to win, and splitting was winning, because I got to have my ceremony on my terms.

I bought a ceremony with my brother.

And I know exactly what it would take to fix it. It would take a phone call in which I say the sentence I just typed. I know his number. I have known it for thirty years.

And I am fifty-four and he is fifty-one and the actuarial tables say we have maybe twenty-five years, and I have spent seven of them deciding how to start the call.