It’s been almost four years, and the cardboard box in the purple bag still sits on the top shelf of my closet, on his side. And I don’t know what to do, even now. I blamed my delays on Covid, but that excuse is ever weaker.
He and I had talked about it in those last sad days. What will I do with his ashes?
He knew his future, of course. He had chosen hospice over chemo that would have given him only a few extra painful months. Instead he planned his final weeks and the what-after. Our financial advisor came to talk to us, to assure him that I would be ok. He talked to friends and family to say he loved them. Love came easily to him in the last years of his life, the years he shared with me.
He decided something of a person’s spirit must remain after death. I was surprised but happy for a thought that must comfort him a little. Was he afraid? Maybe. He had never talked such things before. I knew his final moments would be his alone. I’d seen death before.
At our request two men in black suits and crisp white shirts came to talk about the arrangements, after. He asked us to play “Ode to Joy.” No service No religious music. Just friends talking. And cremation.
But what about that cardboard box? When his first wife died, he and his daughters went to Zion National Park and scattered her ashes in a river there.
We talked about the ashes while the men in the black suits waited. He had decided he wanted the ashes in the back yard, near the white fence of the neighbor. And we should plant a tree over it. “How about a blue spruce?” he said. “Not a spruce,” I said. They get to be enormous. It’ll get too big. We talked about other trees, rejecting them all, one after another. Too big, too messy, too short lived, not beautiful enough. We spent altogether too much time on the discussion of a suitable tree.
“How about a purple plum?” he said. We talked about it, and he decided that would do. A purple plum in the corner of the back yard, near the neighbor’s white fence.
The men in the black suits said goodbye.
“We learned a lot about trees today,” said one, most solemnly. (The memory of that remark still makes me smile.)
These days I worry about a purple plum. When I leave our house, will someone chop it down? Perhaps a tree in a park in the city or the state park would be better? Maybe a park where children play. Or some other place. I don’t know.
And the box still sits on the shelf. Dust and bone. My Jay.
Traditionally, widows mourned for a year. Seems like a long time, but I understand now. It takes that long. It’s been a year since Jay died. A long year.
My writing group meets tomorrow morning, but today, families from Guatemala are in Tijuana hoping for asylum in the U.S. Tonight, in Tijuana, parents and children will sleep on the ground, again. They’ve walked for a month. Only a very few will be allowed to cross the border and apply for asylum. Then husbands may be separated from their wives, mothers from their children. Their suffering is meant to deter others from coming.
Lunch time, we’d walk to a little Jewish restaurant nearby. Emily, the tiniest girl in the women’s dorm, would order a gigantic lunch: a tall glass of milk, a hearty sandwich, dessert. I would always order homemade chicken noodle soup (at twenty-five cents the cheapest thing on the menu) and a glass of water. I’d open the two packets of saltine crackers and put both in my soup.
dumped the contents of my stocking—the nuts, candy, orange, apple, fashion magazine, and fingernail polish on my desk. My mother had forgotten that I didn’t have a nutcracker, so I smashed the walnuts with my shoe and felt very much alone.
There were no meals served Christmas day. The dining staff had been given the day off. Most of the restaurants downtown were closed for the holiday. I bundled up and plowed through a bitterly cold wind, with my boots crunching in the snow, and ate lunch in a deli on Saint Catherine’s Street.
The evening before we left to go back to college, Emily’s dad showed us some special memorabilia in their basement family room. It seems that
The little girls in this story are teenagers now, but I think this story matters now more than ever. Jennifer, my daughter-in-law, told it to me, and it makes me smile.
designs on the hands and feet of the bride, family, and friends with a dye made from the henna plant.
The girls made the final decision.
A conservative friend in Texas asked me a question that caught me off guard and set me thinking. 
I am from Canada. When we crossed into the States to live here for the rest of our lives, I thought about the stories of others who had come from other countries. I felt as if I ought to have climbed mountains or crossed rivers; escaped violence, famine, or persecution; ought to be in shabby clothes, maybe wearing a kerchief over my head tied under my chin, maybe with my belongings wrapped in a pack on my back. 
When we crossed the border in our 1965 blue Volkswagen beetle, with our baby tucked in the space behind the back seat, we’d traveled less than 100 miles. Easy.
I was on my way to becoming an American citizen. Complimentary documents arrived in the mail from the Daughters of the American Revolution. Copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Good stuff.
But I had become a citizen. 
Whenever I ought do chores, I do my research first. Thoroughly. I search the internet or head to the library.
If I want a pot of flowers on the porch, I first read up on
Best of all, the author, Lillian Gilbreth, had amazing credentials. I had heard of her; I had read the book Cheaper by the Dozen when I was a teenager. She was the mother described in the book. She had a PhD and a career as a time-motion efficiency expert. She was married to a man who was also a time-motion expert. And she had twelve children! Who in this wide, wide world would know more about efficiency at home? 
Margaret French, storyteller 