The Roses on Ilene’s Casket

I drove up Saturday morning in the dark. It was eight below zero when I left Medford, and the sky was clear and hard as glass.

By the time I got to Rhinelander, the sun was up and the snow was blinding.

The chapel was nearly full when I got there. Ilene had cooked lunch for two generations of Rhinelander schoolchildren, and it seemed like half of them had come.

Old men in their good flannel shirts. Women from her church circle in wool skirts and snow boots.

I signed the guest book Janet Kruse and stopped there. I didn’t know what else to write. Then I slipped into the second-to-last pew on the left side, against the wall, and kept my coat on.

At the front of the chapel, Ilene’s plain oak casket sat on its stand, closed. And across the top of it, the whole length of the lid, lay the spray of red roses.

They looked even better than they had in the office. The chapel lights caught the petals, and in the center of the spray I could see the small white card tucked in among the green.

Lowell sat in the front pew on the right in a dark suit I didn’t recognize. He had gotten heavier, and his hair was almost all gray now.

Mark sat on one side of him and Jodi on the other. Erin was on the end, next to her husband.

Before the service began, the family was invited up to have a last moment at the casket.

Lowell went first and stood with one hand on the oak. Then Jodi went, and Mark, and they stood there with their heads down.

Then Erin went up.

She stood beside the casket for a long time. Then she leaned in close to the roses, and I saw her reach out and turn the little white card so she could read it.

She read it once. Then she read it again. I watched her shoulders go still.

Erin has known my handwriting since before she could read. She learned her letters off my grocery lists stuck to the refrigerator.

She knew the way I make a capital E, with that little curl at the top. She knew it from across a room.

She turned around and looked down the length of the chapel, past all the rows of flannel shirts and church ladies, until she found me in the second-to-last pew against the wall.

She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Then she bent down and whispered something to Mark and Jodi, and they both turned and looked too.

Erin did not go back to the front pew. She walked right down the side aisle while the organist was still playing the prelude.

She slid into the pew beside me, and without a word she took my hand and held it in her lap.

“Mom,” she whispered. “You wrote the card.”

“Your grandma planned the roses,” I whispered back. “I just took care of the bill for them.”

“You drove all the way up here Tuesday. In that snow. For us.”

“For her,” I said. “And for you. It was the right thing.”

Erin held my hand through the whole service. Through “Abide With Me,” through the pastor’s reading from John, through the part where the pastor talked about Ilene’s thirty-one years in the school kitchen and three old men in the front rows blew their noses.

When the pastor asked if anyone wanted to share a memory, Mark stood up. My son is not a talker.