He tripped suddenly and went stumbling shoulder-first into the dirt of the trail.
“Ow,” he said. “Dammit.”
“Whoa, Dad. Are you okay?”
He got up, wincing. The entire left side of his suit was wet and dirty. He tried his best to dust himself clean.
“What happened?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he just knelt down and pushed aside some brush from the side of the trail. Underneath it was a cream-colored stone with something engraved on it. I knelt beside him. It read, Ella Olson, 1965–2012. A gravestone. Beneath Ella’s name it read: “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”
“Edvard Munch,” I said right away.
My dad looked at me, surprised.
“I studied him in art class.”
He got up and started walking again.
“I guess this is a cemetery after all,” he said.
Now that we were looking down, we spotted stones in other places. They were flat and unobtrusive, scattered here and there like the last remains of an old civilization.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
My dad broke his stare at the ground.
“For what?” he said, his voice a little shaky.
“Your funeral. It sounded cool. I’m sure it would have been great.”
He took a long breath and then nodded.
“Thanks,” he said.
And as we made our way through the grass, and over a small dribbling creek, we eventually caught the sound of a voice coming from the top of a hill. When we looked up, there were a few wisps of white smoke in the air. We could just make out a sparse crowd, their heads all cocked in the same direction. My dad looked at me with a “what now?” kind of glance.
“Now we hike,” I said.
13
No one was dressed in black.
That’s what I noticed first. Instead the mourners wore earth tones. Loose khaki pants. Gortex hiking boots. Like they were on a death safari or something. And they were all gathered around a simple hole in the ground.
The dirt was piled to the side, and surrounding the opening there were wildflowers scattered in a loose border. Just to the right of the grave was a body wrapped in a bright white shroud. Maxine was small and tied up like a birthday present with more flowers under one of the lowering straps.
We made our way to the back of the crowd. No one paid us much notice. The service was coming to an end. A man in a tweed coat burned sage while an older woman in a billowy cotton dress spoke in a lilting voice.
“...although she has created arupturein our lives, she is nourishing the trees and the grasses and the flowers theway she nourished her family. And just as she preserved the optimism of so many women of advanced age, she will now preserve wildlife with the nutrients of her body.”
Two younger guys walked over to the body.
“Her sons,”my dad whispered to me.
They lifted their mother’s shroud over the grave’s opening. She hovered beneath their strained wrists like she was levitating.
“Earth to earth,” began the woman in the robe. “Ashes to ashes.”
