Chapter 22

At home that evening, the parents-in-law took care of writing the notice of Don's death for the newspaper, which was a fortunate thing, because I was in no mental state to do it. I was beginning to feel odd. The next morning, I woke up with the worst cold of my life-- probably acquired from hanging around in the hospital too much. I was running a fairly high fever. Unfortunately, ill or no, there were things that needed doing, so I took Tylenol and headed to the cremation society.

The woman there was very nice. She sat me down and asked what I wanted, then asked if I wanted to see the body, as it needed to be identified before cremation.

I blinked. "Do I have to?"

"No," she answered. "If you have his driver's license, I can do it. But some people like to see the deceased one last time."

I thought about it. Did I really want to see my dead husband after he'd been in a refrigerator all night? At last I shook my head.

"I don't think I want to see him," I said, and handed her the license.

When she came back, I picked out the urn-- a nice, plain, dark wooden box, of which Don would have greatly approved. It would be engraved with his name, birthdate, and date of death. I didn't intend to keep it sitting on my mantel, but it would be displayed at the memorial service, and I thought this plain, dignified vessel would be more fitting than a shoebox marked with Sharpie, at least.

Later that afternoon, the pastor came to my house and consulted with me and the parents-in-law about what we wanted the memorial service to be like.

"We have to have 'Amazing Grace,'" I said. It was, I thought, something of a cliche for funerals, but we'd sung it at both his grandparents' funerals, and I thought of it as something of a family tradition.

"And 'A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," my father-in-law added. "Fortress" is the quintessential Lutheran hymn, and I seemed to recall it from his grandparents' funerals, too.

"We'll need one more," the pastor said.

I thought a moment, and recalled a hymn I was particularly fond of. "Now the Green Blade Rises," I said. The lyrics seemed apropos to me: Now the green blade rises from the buried grain, wheat that in dark earth many days has lain.

We discussed what Bible verses we wanted read. I would have liked to hear the Swinburne poem that had come to me so often in his last days, but one line ("dead men rise up never") struck me as inappropriate for church, so I didn't ask. It kept running through my head, though. Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.

Don, I thought, was free of pain and exhaustion at last. And that led to the thought that death wasn't the enemy here. The enemy had been the cancer.

But death... death was a friend.