We were married for 26 years, my first wife and I. Good ones. American dream thing: two good kids. Two homes (second one a big upgrade). Good income - if spotty. But she would not kick the cigarettes, and so she died at 49 from lung cancer operation. Eleven days in Intensive (after being “lost” in the hospital one whole night after leaving the operating room). Oxygen. Did her in, actually. Lot of folks don’t understand that: oxygen can kill you even as it is “saving” you). Some days when it rains, it pours.

I okay’d the autopsy. I went “home.” (Kinda empty). My folks – old then like I am now – were there. Kids. Hospital called. “What you want to do with the body?” I had overlooked that. “Oh,” I said, “ why take it to the undertaker’s.” I hung up. I guess I seemed uncertain because my old man (we were never really “close” in strange way), pretty silent guy (as I am not) looked up and said, “C’mon son, I’ll go with you. Let’s go to the funeral home.”

So we did. The undertaker’s office was way up on third floor of this old Colonial New England place on Rte. 7. We huddled under the slanted roof by his desk. He started to review caskets and services. I guess I was kinda in “shock” as they say. My old man said, “That won’t be necessary. My son believes in cremation. I think.”

The undertaker shifted to a selection of cremation caskets. After looking at the drab pictures, I asked him what the body was in now. He pointed to one of the pictures that looked – to me – no different than any of the others. “That one,” he said, “that is what we put them in from the hospital.”

“What’s wrong with that one,” I said?

“Well.” he said, “we just call that a ‘mortuary box.’”

“I see”, I said. “ When they cremate though, it all gets burned up – right?”

“Yes,” he said.

My father said, “The mortuary box will do fine”.

(It is true at the time I had just lost a couple of big accounts and my business was really hurting – but this really was not guiding anything. But my Dad – as I do not – always knew where the dollars were – and were not. I wish I had more of him in me).

So it was all settled. We went “home.” My mom cooked dinner for us all – then they went back to Stamford where they lived. First my mom said,

“You can call the Congregationalists, you know – they will conduct a memorial service for anyone, I believe. And here is Jean’s favorite robe and her slippers. Take them to the undertaker and ask if they could put these on her. (I did but of course I have no idea if he did or not).

(I believe it was Congregationalists – I am a nonbeliever as was Jean (perhaps unduly influenced by my agnostic ways, for which I am sorry – as I am sorry for a lot of things in this world. Never could see that being sorry changed anything one jot, however). Anyhow I did, and they did, and a Minister appeared next day and we arranged for the Memorial Service. It must have been Congregationalists (lot of ‘em up that way) because it was in their beautiful white-spired, New England Church in the Wilton town center, I remember. The service, as befits those grim Protestant notions, was simple, austre, and serene. There was obviously no casket and no remains.

My mom remarked later how curious it was the Minister conducted the entire service and never once mentioned Jean by name… Maybe he forgot – I don’t really know. There is a lot about religious folks and their notions and ways I do not know.

And so it went. The blistering hot days and lonely hot nights of a humid Connecticut summer settled down upon us. I went into NYC a few times on the train and went drinking with some old buddies and came back out on the “cow-killer” in the wee small hours. It didn’t really help much and the hangovers were just an extra added burden. The kids were silent and didn’t say much. They worked anyhow, and were getting ready to go back to college.

One day there was a knock at the front door. I answered it. Guy in suit standing there with a large cookie tin (no label) under his arm. “Here’s your wife’s remains,” he said and handed me the cookie tin and left. It was surprisingly heavy – and I thought on calcium – the stuff of unburnable bone parts maybe – and how close it was to lead in the periodic chart… Funny what you think of at times like that. I’m an archeologist (only a jackleg of sorts – like everything else I ever “was”) but I have handled my share of bones anyhow in my time. They don’t really “upset” me…

Where to put it? (We had all planned to “spread them” when they arrived but no further plans had been made). I set it beside the night-table by my bed – against the wall. After about a month went by – and no one had moved her things on her dresser, or her clothes in closet – waiting for her like they were – and the tin still sat there… I decided we had to “do something.”

Mom and Pop came up again. I know the drive was not easy for them. Like I said, they were old then already, but they had loved Jean like their own daughter. (Which in way of course, she was). So Mom said, “This house , son, was Jean’s dream of heaven and her whole existence. You and the kids can do no better than to spread her ashes here where her heart always was.” We agreed, me and the kids. “But,” said mom, “you must never say anything to anyone,” for if kids or wagging tongues anywhere ever get wind you spread “ashes” here – they will peg your house as the “haunted” house of the neighborhood, and you will never be able to sell and move on.”

She of course, was right. And we never did.

We went out back on a beautiful little hill that led right down to the side of our basement and stretched away into the deep woods behind our place. The little hill was covered with wild huckleberry and rhododendron bushes here and there. Old Sham, our dog, lived at the end of a chain and in an old doghouse up by the stone wall. Sham was the love of her life.

So I opened the tin and began to reach in and scatter the ashes. Almost at once I saw a tiny fragment of a trochanter… but I did not hesitate. (Like I say archeologists – most of us – come to know our bones…). They were curiously blue-and-white calcined tiny fragments – exactly like we often sifted from the Indian camps and fires in our digs – which we always presumed were evidences of cremation practices amongst the aborigines, too. It seemed a strange sort of confirmation.

As we threw the handsful of dust into the air it rained down in the windless heat and you could hear it sift softly into the huckleberry leaves around us. The finer particles hung in the air like a faint smoke or wraith and drifted very slowly off and vanished. My daughter gave out first with one or two heart-broken sobs and ran back to the arms of her grandmother, both sobbing silently by the house. Pop was too old to help. To tell the truth, I wasn’t feeling too spunky myself, but the cookie tin was sizeable and there was more to do. I stumbled on some best I could.

Just then my son – a boy to that instant – turned man before my eyes: he had been the apple of his mother’s eye, and had been helping some too behind us. When he saw his older sister break off and me trying to carry on, he suddenly appeared at my elbow - a heartsick young boy maybe just turned twenty and he said, “Here, Pop – le'me help you with that,” and he took the tin from me and together we both finished up and the last dust sifted down and settled and summer silence came again to the woods.

And that’s how we said goodby to our Jean - wife and mother - long ago.

Some days later, a large, showy, woman’s handbag arrived in the mail – it was some kind of premium thing that Jean had won or something from Exxon gas stamps or something: something she had seen in their monthly bills and much wanted. (In my next life – soon to ensue – my second wife was to buy all her handbags in Fifth Avenue Christian Di’or French chic shops and whatal – but that is another story indeed…). So Jean never saw the Exxon bag. I dug a hole further up the hill and buried it, along with her favorite Black Watch cap she used to wear. The huckleberries grew back over the spot and there is no trace.

And once I was walking out there months later, and old Sham who lived amongst gnawed bones was rolling in the dusty path in dog delight… and in his heavy coat I suddenly saw tiny flecks of bone dust… and here and there on the ground, I could still see tiny bits if I got down and looked. And they were not dog bone fragments. Jean loved old Sham so it didn’t seem a “sacriliege” (to me anyhow), but I am only a brand among the burning to begin with.

I saw a painting once – in Germany shortly after the War – it was a group of schoolchildlren in a playground dancing around in a child’s circle game of some kind… and down beneath their feet were the mouldering remains of a fallen German soldier in an obliterated grave the artist had painted in … buried we suppose and forgotten in some distant battle on those same playgrounds once. The title of the picture always stuck with me: “The Dust is Whirling in the Dust.”

And once it occurred to me how odd it was that just inside those cement block walls that were our basement foundation against this very hill, were some of my steel storage specimen cabinets and in them were many small vials and in those vials were calcined human bone fragments – laboriously sifted and washed from ancient Indian campsites I had dug. THESE fragments were somehow cataloged and saved harmless; those of my beloved wife had been committed again back to the nature from whence we all come.

And many, many, months later… her doctor called to say the autopsy was finished. The cancer had metastasized throughout her body. I asked why had it taken so long. He said, “It takes a long time, a very long time, to slice up a human brain.” I said, “Well, thanks. I see what you mean.”

It is a strange world indeed, but if you live long enough, you, too will most likely come to know that personally – and either accomodate to it, or go nuts.