Bunny's Ashes

The mysteries of receiving my mother's cremains.

A lovely, mysterious thing happened! A couple of days ago, my wife Sara and I came back from a biking-and-birding adventure and found this box on our doorstep. I hadn’t expected to receive my mother’s ashes from the Chicago crematorium so soon. But what astonished me were the beautiful, yellow flowers that someone had placed on top of the box. Who had left them there? My first thought — kind of crazy in retrospect, perhaps — was that the crematorium people had somehow arranged for the flowers to be left there. (I called them the next day; they hadn’t.) Our apartment building has a courtyard in the middle, on our level — but none of the residents’ garden patches contain flowers like these. So the mystery remains unsolved.

Though this placement of Bunny’s cremation box on our armchair is only temporary, it seems fitting for someone who was such a passionate reader.

Now there’s a question of where to put the box of cremains. (I’m a long way from considering where, or even whether, to spread her ashes. I want her here.) I think Sara just came up with a genius solution — that I put the box up on one of our bookshelves. I’ll surround it with some of the authors she loved: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Anaïs Nin’s diaries. Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. I’ll also make sure to put some mystery novels nearby — Mom loved mysteries!