The typical question, “Whaddya want them to do with your body after you’re dead?”

I really don’t care. I won’t be there. I’ll be dead.

They can do whatever they want with me, but my advice is do the cheapest thing.

Don’t waste your money.

The cheapest thing these days is cremation.

They used to dig a hole in the backyard, but that’s frowned on now, it’s even illegal if anybody finds out.

Funerals are a growth industry. People are dying right and left.

You buy a plot from the area available to your pocketbook, the way rich people buy box seats at the theater.

Then you pay the embalmer, and the make-up artist who also works for Hollywood to make you look so much like the picture of you so that people passing by your open casket say, “So lifelike,” and “It looks like he’s asleep.”

The casket itself is a coffin costing an arm and a leg, and they always try to upgrade you from pine to mahogany.

This is all for the benefit of the living. They say they’re “honoring your legacy.” Some of them actually knew you, even loved you, and sign the “Remembrance Book.” Other people, even some relatives, hardly knew you, and show up out of “duty” or “respect” especially if you’re known in the community and their presence enhances their status, or they’re running for office and it’s a photo op.

Most people die without fanfare. You can tell how “important” they are by counting the people in the “audience” or the signatures in the Book.

Most people aren’t rich or famous. Too often they have to mortgage their house to pay for their funeral.

Cremation is cheaper, quicker, faster, the slogan of NASA when the new Director way-back-when took over and I was there at the announcement in Washington.

The poet says, when we die and are buried in earth, we decompose into dirt and fertilize the roots from which flowers grow. Shakespeare knew this, as did his buddy John Donne who overlapped him. Death is not the end. “Death, thou shalt die.”

We need more poetry in our lives.

When my Father died, my Mother swooped in from her latest marriage, took charge, cremated him and had, she told us, his ashes scattered at Rose Hills, not far from Forest Lawn which is more famous. We’d wave every time we drove by on the freeway.

When Shirley’s Mother, Virginia, Yaya, died and was cremated, Kristina paid the airfare for Jimmy, her Papou, to take her ashes to Greece. He promised to give us our share, but never did. He didn’t stay very long in Greece because nearly everybody he knew was already ashes. I don’t know where he sprinkled Yaya, but he came home without her.

When Papou died, he too was reduced to ashes.

My Mother’s ashes are in New York.

It’s a family tradition on both sides.

Whenever I visit a graveyard, which isn’t often, I pause before the tombstones and grave markers. I think the thoughts you think when you’re still living and they’re not.

The mausoleum by the graveyard like the one in Altadena where they also have concerts and Halloween, they have rows and stacks of filing drawers where they keep the ashes of those who don’t have graves.

The most powerful college application essay I ever read was by a senior in my class who wrote three pages when the limit was one. He ended with a description of the gathering of mountain-climbing friends meeting at the top of the cliff in Yosemite with the ashes of a friend they released to the winds in the morning light of the rising sun.

It’s an especially painful tragedy, because my student’s lung collapsed, his doctors forbad him to ever fly in an airplane, keep his elevation low, no more rock climbing. His first year at Stanford, on Christmas break, with a climbing friend and the impetuousness of youth, they climbed the cliff at Yosemite, half way up, both hanging in harness to sleep through the night before the final ascent in the morning, the elevation took its revenge, his friend lowered him to the ground, panicking because no one was around to hear their cries for help, and he died in his friend’s arms. All his friends gathered and released his ashes off the same cliff into the morning light.

Few of us describe our own death, word for word.

My life is a series of ashes.

When Shirley died, my life ended.

My Daughter rescued me, and we planned the cremation.

The medical people told us about subsidized cremations for $35.

Kristina signed us up with the Neptune Society. They cost more, but would take care of everything. I didn’t care about the extra expense. Kristina paid for a custom box to hold the ashes.

They gave me the shiny wooden box, and the ashes separately in cardboard with a label, name, date. There’s a standing offer to scatter the ashes at sea.

The ashes are still in their little cardboard box on the chest of drawers in my bedroom, next to the shiny wooden box.

I never transferred them.

I don’t disturb the ashes.

I opened the top once and looked at them. Shirley wasn’t there.

I used to greet them every day, caress the container, kiss the box.

Now, four years later, I go for days without looking at the box. Every day the ashes are a reminder of death and loss. But they’re not Shirley.

That’s why I don’t disturb the ashes.

Shirley is still alive in every part of me.

That’s why, when I die, they should cremate me and save my money for the living.

Then they can take Shirley’s ashes, and mingle my ashes with hers.