Sunday, July 10, 2011

Price -- The Day After

Here's my Facebook Page entry (with additions):  "Thank you so much, everybody. We had a lovely funeral, walked the beach, waded around in the mouth of the Clallam river, then went to the Clallam Bay Inn for MacNJack and Fish and chips.This morning I bumped into an invisible kitty hock and accidentally put down the same number of bowls (which I left; I figured he'd get the spirit food). 

Thank all of you so much for all your prayers and thoughts for him. I think funerals let us cry for ourselves, too (why dry-humored Britain went to pieces over Princess Di). I'm sharing the t-shirt quote. It gave me the first laugh today."

The T-shirt line:  "All our kitties and our favorite t-shirts are waiting for us in heaven."  

After a thorough washcloth bathing the night before, and being formed into a comfy posture and left to cool down and compose himself on a red towel in the back bathtub,  Price was wrapped in a grey, silver-shot pashmina I'd found years ago scrunched down in a knot in a filthy muddy hole  in a Seattle sidewalk and not only resurrected, but wore for years.  His outside wrap was one of Dan's maternal grandmother's quilts, on the bed for years and beginning to fray (We use respected old fabrics as funeral wraps). They were both handled by us and the cats, so they would smell familiar.  As we dug the grave, he got to lie in the middle room on the guest bed, which he'd always loved.

The grave was in sand, bedded with salmon-berry branches, then the mummy bundle -- head to the west -- topped with a wooden bowl with milk, margarine and a chunk of freshly-cooked salmon, wrapped in a red silk shirt I'd been saving for a funeral, covered with peach and plum twigs and some sword fern, then more salmon berry, then filled in carefully with goodbyes and hopes.  On top went a crystal vase with a red wrapped beeswax candle, surrounded by four Rainforest incense sticks.  The candle burned all day.  The salmon-berry birds sang in the woods into evening.

We should all get such funerals.

Good traveling, Price.

Price in my Seattle Pashmina

1 comment:

Starshadow said...

Safe journey, Price, over the rainbow bridge and may Bast watch over you, feed you salmon, and open all your doors.