‘This Is Us’ Reveals Why Jack Pearson Was Cremated

The follow up to This Is Us’ post-Super Bowl reveal came with many truths, and crying.

During Tuesday’s episode, titled “Across The Border”, viewers saw various scenes from the lives of the Pearson’s, related to their Grand Wagoneer. In one of the scenes, Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) are leaving the hospital after Rebecca gets a preventative MRI because she has been feeling dizzy.

Determined to keep Rebecca distracted as they wait for the results of the test, Jack tells her he’s going to take her somewhere special.

The couple drives to the site of Jack’s favorite tree, where they sit in the snow and Jack tells Rebecca she’s going to live forever. Jack then gets paged, letting them know the test results are in.

Rebecca calls the hospital and they tell her the MRI came out clean and she just has something minor. Relieved, the couple gets back in the car to go home. Jack, however, tells his wife again that she is going to live forever, which means that he will go first. Rebecca hesitates to go into the topic but Jack says he just wants her to know that when he goes, he doesn’t want her to put him underground.

He says he wants to be able to move around.

During Jack’s funeral, viewers can see Jack’s urn, which ends up on Kate’s mantle.

Ahead of the episode, Mandy Moore said the follow-up to the post-Super Bowl episode was even more heart-breaking.

“I think that it’s more gut-wrenching than [the Super Bowl episode] because people knew what to expect,” Mandy Moore said to Entertainment Weekly. “They were like, ‘All right — this is it.’ You’re bracing for impact. You know that this is the episode where you get all the answers that you’ve been asking since the show started. [With ‘Across the Border’], in typical This Is Us fashion, they’ve found a way to meld really beautiful stories from the past to highlight what an incredible example of a man and a father and a husband that Jack was in every sense. They highlight every one of his most winning attributes and couple that with us going through the steps of burying him — of saying goodbye to him.”

This Is Us airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.