Celebrating a life

Many of you have been asking if there are plans for a funeral or memorial service for Hilary Teachout, my beloved wife, who died peacefully on Tuesday night after we spent our last good day together. It stands to reason that the coronavirus has made normal funerals impossible for now, but I intend to hold a memorial service for Hilary later this year, probably some time this summer. I’ll let you know where and when.

Not surprisingly, Hilary wanted her organs harvested and the rest of her body left to science, but the transplant therapies she underwent made it impossible for her to donate any of her organs, and I found out after her death that Columbia University’s whole-body donation program has been temporarily suspended because of the coronavirus. Stymied by this discovery, I thought long and hard about what to do, given the fact that Hilary had never made any secret of her deep-seated, long-standing loathing for cemeteries.

Then it came to me: I decided to cremate her body and scatter the ashes off Florida’s Sanibel Island, to which she dreamed of returning throughout the final weeks of her life. We spent countless hours walking up and down the sandy beaches of Sanibel and sitting on the porch of the cozy little rented bungalow where we spent six precious Januaries together, a place whose owner adored her, just like everyone else whose path she crossed. Even after she could no longer walk on the beach, she looked at it each day with delight.

Alas, we weren’t able to return to Sanibel when Hilary’s health took a turn for the worse at the end of 2017, and after that we spent many hours remembering our endlessly happy times by the water and making elaborate plans for what we would do after she got her new lungs and was able to travel once again. It stood to reason, then, that she would be pleased for her ashes to become part of the place she loved best, and so my own plan is to fly down to Sanibel this December, spend a month in the bungalow we shared, and commit Hilary’s earthly remains to the Gulf of Mexico as the sun sets. She will be home at last.

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“Requiem,” by Ned Rorem, performed by Charles Bressler and the composer. The words are by Robert Louis Stevenson: