Ashes to Ashes
By Gene Aronowitz
One morning
in April, two-thousand-and-twenty,
people, contained at home,
were as present
as possible
at the funeral of
a young woman
who died at forty-five of cancer
in a month when
death had become
commonplace. I was especially
touched by
the sight of her two young children
in the front row of that almost empty
chapel in the United Kingdom
where they
and their father
still live. How sad it was
I thought,
that our friends, the children’s grandparents,
could not
be with them
to comfort them
to hug them.
The sight of the urn,
containing her ashes,
transported me
to the mausoleum
that will house the urn
that will contain my ashes
and those of my wife, located across the street
from a bakery with a sign
that usually makes me laugh
because it prophetically contains the words
“Baked in Brooklyn.” But I did not
laugh that day, understanding
that if we also died, the waiting list
for our turn in that retort,
the eighteen hundred and fifty-degree furnace,
would undoubtedly be
interminable and the overflowing
chapel I so often visualized would be as
bare as the one I saw on my screen.
