Ashes to Ashes

A few weeks ago I saw Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf Goodman’s.  It’s a fascinating look at the history and the legend that is the famous New York City luxury store.  The title of the film had come from a French woman’s comment that because Bergdorf’s was so heavenly, she wanted her remains to be tossed there after she died.

I love Bergdorf’s, too.  My first visit there was on my July 1969 honeymoon- exactly forty-four years ago right now.  My brand-new (and very young) husband, Billy S. treated me to a Pretty Woman fashion-buying spree and I was in junior miss Bigi paradise.  I can still remember how thrilled I felt as I tried on all those wonderful clothes.  And I can still remember what I bought.  (And more importantly, if I still had them, I could still fit in them.)

And this flick made me review my own après-death plans as well.

When I shuffle off this mortal coil, my kids know what to do.  I will be nuked and Natasha will take half of me to Florence and dump me in the Arno.  (I have already left her a list of great trattorias and snazzy places to buy gloves so the trip shouldn’t be a total sentimental waste of her time.)

Nick will take the other half of my dust and toss it down Gowdy’s- a very challenging ski run on Snowmass Mountain.  (How challenging?  When Nick was about thirteen, he told me that while he was waiting to jump into the chute, a “big kid”- maybe seventeen- was ahead of him.  Nick stood around politely waiting for him to go. Finally the older boy said to Nick, “You go, man.  I’m looking for my balls.”  That’s Gowdy’s.)

But the movie also triggered a memory of the only cremation I have ever attended.  It was that of my ex husband Bill’s sister, Barbara, and it was back in 1982.

Let me state, for the record, that Bill and his older-by-four-years sibling were not at all close.  They were polar opposites in terms of um…everything.  She was short.  He was tall.  He was successful.  Her husband wasn’t.  He was handsome.  She got gypped in the gene pool lotto.  And to compound matters, their parents vastly preferred her to him.  And had since childhood.

She had been doted on, catered to and spoiled since birth.  Bill had basically been ignored.  Naturally, this bred resentment on his part.

I didn’t get any of it.  I adore my younger brother and have from the moment I first saw him in his crib. We’ve been close ever since.  But since I came on the scene many years after the fact, I had to accept the idea that Bill and Barbara were not duplicates of Kenny and me.

When she passed away though, common courtesy dictated that Bill and I attend her funeral.  And boy was it strange.  Her husband, the non-grieving widower, got up in the temple, held up her date book, and delivered a rambling, free-associating rant about her life as a social worker in an office above a paint store in Des Plaines.

This paint store was mentioned many times throughout his incoherent tirade.  But he neglected to mention her three children- an older girl and two younger boys- her truly-grieving mother or anything else.

At the end of his oration, he shouted, “Barbara R.  July 23.  Four p.m.  Good-bye!”  and slammed the date book closed.

The entire audience jumped.  And it got even weirder.  The rabbi came over to Bill, handed him a cunning cardboard box with a handle, and said in hushed tones, “This is for you.  Take it back to the house.  You’ll know what to do with it.”

OMG!  Barbara is now carryout, I thought.  She’s in there with the honey and the Wetnap!

I was completely unnerved.  But the box turned out only to hold prayer books for the minyan.  My nerves had been shaken by the bizarreness of the eulogy.

But anyway…Bill and Barbara had been so estranged that I didn’t even meet her until, a couple of years after we were married, she expressed an interest in seeing our house in Barrington Hills.  So Bill invited her family over for a tour and dinner.

Bill and I shared eleven bucolic acres with a very handsome apricot standard poodle named Arno.  I was pregnant with Natasha, and all I knew about my sister-in-law’s family was that she had three kids.

And Bill told me that one of the boys was retarded.

(Author’s Note: PC Police.  Please don’t go all medieval on my ass.  That was the word he used back in 1978.  In 1978 we didn’t know from “autistic,” or “ADD,” or “ADHD,” or “challenged,” or “Asperger’s.”  Bill told me the kid was retarded and I went with it.)

I didn’t want our big poodle jumping up or scaring him in any way, so before their ETA, I locked Arno in his dog run.