Acquaintances of mine sold a longtime family property in a midsized rural city in the American South. The house, which I’ve visited on occasion, was large, wooden, and gracious, the kind with modest acreage and an assortment of elms and maples that only its owner could distinguish among. It also contained a once meticulously caressed garden whose herbs and sprouts were tended in a way I associated, old-school style, with gender. The man of the house instructed and managed the lawn’s greenery, whereas the woman, in this case the wife, made from the herbs a quadrangle of resplendence whose bounty delighted all manner of salads.

When a relative dies, properties often change hands. They break with human lineage to become objects assessed in terms of those needed and those wise to discard, either because managing them becomes too onerous or because of the lucre of their market price, and, moreover, what that cash might mean to the surviving relative.

The keeping or selling is, in that sense, largely amoral, in that sentimentality has realistic limits. All the more so in a largely affluent society that has hitched its fortunes to a Web-wise transience that prizes the allure of all things visible, loud, and immediate.

This can make the inherent transience of celebrity seem permanent, which it is not. Two graves lay within the acreage of the homestead my acquaintance sold. In the front yard are the ashen and unmarked remains of the man’s sister, who died in her infancy. In the back, in that herbaceous garden, are those of his mother, who died more recently and asked to be seeded among her plants. His father made no such request, but handfuls of his ashes were given as a palmed offering to the wind so that they might cotton to the ample grass all around the house.

Thus, when this property was sold, so were these remains, not as goods but perhaps as an inherent remnant of previous occupants.

I do not believe in ghosts, so this is not a ghost story. Nor do I believe in the essentialness of tombstones or similar markings intended to commemorate lives overtaken and canceled by the passage of time. Remembrance in the mind’s wistful eye is fine by me.

And yet, that said . . . I am not entirely at peace with the passage of these ashes from family to strangers, though ashes recognize neither.

That may very well be because I recall the long-gone mother occasionally loitering over the spot where her infant daughter had been buried, the cinders stroked into the grounds by her stoic hands. I remember the mother before the illness struck her down, wedded as she was to her herbs. I recall the father, who, while he did not treat this resting spot as holy, tended to his grounds with sacred devotion, as if the “something more” of them gave earnestness to his seeding and raking, the herb garden still masculine and plentiful long after his wife had stopped feeding its needs.

I did not mention any of this to my acquaintances, instead taking pleasure in hearing how pleased he was to have found the proper buyer. He had done his job. He could not have managed the family home, now far from his own. He liked the buyers, a local lawyer and his incipient family. In a word, the transition was apt.

What to do, then, with these reflections on mortality and their aftermath, this little paean to ashes now under . . . what? New ownership, perhaps — deeded over, why not, along with land? Do not millions of tombstones go forever unvisited, many caving in on themselves?

What I cannot squander (blame it on age), and my acquaintances could, was memory — which may be the only true spirituality a secularist knows. Like saving a book read ages ago, one never to be enjoyed again, I nonetheless want it in my chest. In the end I want my ashes — like my memories — in a place, my apartment, that no one will be entitled to sell, lest someone make off with both, which, alive or dead, would break my godless but ferociously wistful heart.