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but doubtless there’s something in the Stamford town code about that.
    Buried deep in my Irish DNA is an atavistic habeas corpus craving for the body. The wake thing. Cremation nullifies that,
     even if the act of scattering ashes can be ritualistically clean and satisfying. One wants—or I do, anyway—corporeal presence.
     I remember reading an account by Ken Kesey, heart-wrenching but entirely dry-eyed, of how he dealt with the body of his son,
     killed in an accident: They brought him home and hand-made a coffin for him and buried him themselves. This need is—manifestly—at
     the root of the Catholic mass, in which bread and wine is “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ. But Pup was
     adamant. Her ashes were to go into the sculpted bronze cross in the garden, where his would, in turn, also be placed when
     his time came.
    Chris left the room to go total it all up. You could hear a loud
ka-chinng.
When he returned, it all came, somehow, to $6,007. * What is one supposed to say?
Jeez Louise, we’re looking for a little cremation, not a full-blown Viking funeral.
Where is Jessica Mitford when you need her?

CHAPTER 4
That Sounded Like a Fun Dinner

    P up arranged with the pastor to hold a private service at St. Andrew’s, the Episcopalian—or, as my Canadian-born Mum always
     insisted on calling it, Anglican—church in Stamford. We gathered there Wednesday morning: Pup, me, Danny, Mum’s devoted friend
     Richard Heanue, and the household staff.
    St. Andrew’s, it was obvious, had fallen into decay. The stained-glass rosette window above the entrance had been removed.
     The rectory next door was all boarded up. Perhaps it was because there were only ten of us, in a church built for four hundred
     or more, but there was a palpable sense of encroaching desolation. It made me sad on this gray and chilly April day to think
     that a part of Mum’s Stamford was passing away along with her.
    She was here with us, by the altar, in a neatly wrapped box. Her priest was quite elderly now, semi-retired, birdlike, frail
     but irrepressibly chatty and ebullient, and proud of the homily that he had prepared. He delivered it in singsong tones, indistinguishable
     from his conversation. I was impressed, yet again, by the superiority of the
Book of Common Prayer
to the pasteurized blancmange of the modern Catholic liturgy. Listening to a contemporary American Catholic priest say the
     mass invariably reminds me of Robert Taylor as the Roman centurion in
Quo Vadis
, giving himself a salutary whack across the leather breastplate and saying in his Nebraskan accent,
Hail, Marcus Glaucus. By Jupiter, what are they feeding those gladiators at the Colosseum these days?
It just sounds better in the original Latin.
    We thanked dear, sweet old Father Flutie. As we left, one of Chris’s funeral directors, a lady dressed in a pinstripe pantsuit,
     handed me my mother in a shopping bag. There was an undeniable symmetry to it: How many shopping bags had I seen Mum toting
     during her lifetime? Hundreds, anyway. I got into the car and handed the box to Sineda and Julia, Mum’s maids, saying—trying
     to lighten the mood—
“Toma la señora.”
(Here, take the señora.) At this they both burst into tears, these dear, devoted, faithful ladies who had taken such loving
     care of her over the years. They caressed and patted the box lovingly, murmuring to her as we drove back to the house.
    Pup announced to me after lunch that we must catalog Mum’s books in her bedroom. I was a bit nonplussed. Mum’s library would
     not be mistaken for an annex of the Library of Congress, consisting as it did of a pile of (largely unread) mystery novels
     and thrillers. I was tired and chafed at this pointless forced labor, but sensing that Pup wanted to keep busy—
industry is the enemy of melancholy
—I went along, duly taking dictation from him on my laptop as he read off the titles. That done, we set down to the more plausible
     task