I buried Oscar's ashes this morning ...

... up close to the grave I had created for Ada in October, last year. As I arrived home wearily from the writer's workshop with Natalie Goldberg at Villa Lina, I found the box of Ada's ashes waiting for me by the front door. We had both arrived on the same day. I remember feeling a twinge of pain reverberating through my heart strings, when I discovered the box on the front porch as I dragged my suitcase up the steps. I took Oscar's ashes out to the back yard and dug a hole in the cold dark ground around Ada's grave. I spoke to him in my mind assuring him of Ada's company and the coming of warmer months. Breaking open the plastic bag that held his ashes, I poured them into the earth, and then laid some daffodil bulbs on top. They had bloomed for a couple of weeks in my office during the last weeks of February when I needed to cheer myself up and onward through to the end of winter. 

When I came back into the house, Mimi was waiting for me by the back door. She mewed sweetly and smelled my hands, licking them over and over again with her raspy tongue no doubt checking out where I had been without her as she sat by the window watching. I said out loud, "Mimi, I buried your brother this morning." 

Then we went upstairs to my study. Mimi jumped up into the soft, white bed I placed on my desk next to the computer. She curled up, first looking back at me as I began typing. She purred as I put my hand out to stroke her.

I sensed Ada and Oscar close by looking on with approval. 

I looked up at the computer screen for a moment and then began writing:

I buried Oscar's ashes this morning ...

Comments

[Marion Barnett]

Mimi sounds like she has taken up some of Ada's behaviors....on the little bed in your study.:)