When Cathy was in hospice, we didn’t talk a lot about the Big Inevitable Thing that was about to happen. It was too upsetting for her. We had, however, done some preliminary planning many years ago, and this was codified during her treatment. I knew, then, what she wanted; we both decided on cremation for ourselves for a number of practical reasons. However, neither one of us wanted to hold on indefinitely to the other’s remains and so we decided to do something with them.
I won’t tell you what I want done with mine; you’ll just have to come to the funeral. Cathy’s solution was not nearly so interesting; she was fine with having her ashes scattered. Several locations were mentioned, but we always came back to Austin, where her heart’s home was.
This came up again during hospice. I asked her if she’d thought about it, and she said, “Maybe Town Lake?” She used to row there in college and kept it up for a while afterward as an exercise regimen. She loved it and always wished she could get back to it.
It was a solid choice. But I had another idea. “What about at Cliff Drive?” I countered.
Her eyes lit up. “Yes,” she said. “Do that.”
When I met Cathy, she and her sister Barbara were living in a small, heavily shaded neighborhood just off of Lakeshore Drive in Austin. Their place was an old garage apartment, part of a quad, originally built in the 1940s as a stone wall garage with the apartment over it. Sometime in the 1970s the garage got walled in and finished so that it was now an apartment with a nearly identical floorplan to the original one above it. What was cool about it was the wrought iron spiral staircase that connected the two living spaces. It was very bohemian and oh so very, well, South Austin. I started calling it The Bungalow of Love (shades of Lou Reed).
The Bungalow of Love was inextricably tied into our lives in Austin. We fell in love while Cathy lived there. Later, after I moved in, we got engaged there. We got married while living there. Dinner parties. Our first Thanksgiving together. It was her favorite place to live. Mine, too. It seemed absolutely right to bring her back home.
In the intervening years, the property owner had completely landscaped the front yard and the central courtyard between the four freestanding apartments. Behind our old digs, there was now a gravel path that flanked the house and led to a beautiful limestone fountain, two seating areas. In the center of the circular path, which winds around to the fountain and over to an open air patio space, there is a Chinese elm. It’s completely in the shade of the two leftmost apartments. The whole area is clearly meant to be a meditation space. The landlord graciously volunteered the elm tree for Cathy’s final resting place.
It was absolutely perfect. She would have loved it.
A mixture of old friends and family stood with me. I didn’t know what to say. I had one thing planned, and I did that first. Cathy had told our niece that she wanted a particular Tom Petty song played at her funeral. Our niece assumed that something so important would be a thing we all knew about, and so she didn’t say anything. Unfortunately, Cathy didn’t tell anyone else.
I thanked everyone for coming, and then played “The Waiting.”
It made me laugh. Cathy had a very dry sense of humor, and I know this was supposed to be a joke to make us all laugh. I don’t know if anyone else did, but I appreciated the effort. Some folks spoke after that, and said very nice things. I wanted the people who weren’t at the funeral to be able to speak if they were so moved.
When no one else had anything to add, I played another Tom Petty song, from one of Cathy’s favorite Tom Petty albums. The song was “Wildflowers.”
I know those ashes aren’t Cathy anymore. They aren’t the things that made her. They aren’t her heart, her soul, her dry sense of humor, her huge sense of fairness. It was merely, as Yoda once pointed out to Luke Skywalker on Dagobah, “this crude matter.” But bringing her remains home, to reside in the place she loved so much, and nourish a tree that, I guarantee, if she could have planted herself, she would have...well, I can’t speak for Cathy, not anymore. But I felt a sense of peace within myself when I stood up. I took a deep breath, smelling the fresh earth, the air, pregnant with rain, and the wet limestone fountain with water softly splashing into the stonework basin. I held that breath and let it go. It felt like a sigh of relief.
It’s okay now. It’s going to be all right. I’m going to make it. And Cathy is home.
I added one more song to the playlist at the last minute. Another
Tom Petty song. Perfect for the occasion. He wrote it for the soundtrack to the
movie She’s the One. It’s called “Angel Dream (no 2).”
We stood around after that, hugging, talking, comforting one another, and eventually, laughing. Old friends and family. The tree took it all in. I hoped later, that night, during the rain that fell in thick drops, the Chinese elm whispered to Cathy everything that was said while we stood around the tree, and I hope something I said made her laugh and say, “Oh, Honey.”
