Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral Read Online Free Page B

no formal service because I know that death does not erase my memory in your life and I suspect that you will not be gone from my lingering spirit either. Those damn funerals have always driven me crazy—celebrate, I say—life, death—living and this process of dying that parallels our lives every single moment.
    Honor me now and you will honor yourselves. Honor me now with this one last gift of a traveling funeral no matter how impossible the asking might seem when you first hear it and I promise that you will find something that will secure you a place in your grieving, in your other losses that will set the tone for the days and nights that are lined up and waiting for you—maybe not so patiently and maybe not so far away.
    I have given great thought to this adventure because I have been given a tiny gift of time to ponder that and so many other things as well. I have selected six locations for you to spread my ashes—places where something grand and remarkable passed into and through my life. Places—one where I made love for so many nights in a row we almost had to send for help (you guess the location), one where I let go of something so old and heavy that I almost flew without wings . . . Well, you get the pattern and you five women will now set the pace for this trip and see what happens. Just see.
    For if people could see—if women especially could see—what is real and true and how the elegant possession of what is in each of our individual hearts is what matters more than anything—well, oh, please just see—always see.
    This is what you will see next:
    California—my beloved Sonoma County.
    Albuquerque, New Mexico.
    The Florida Keys.
    New York City.
    The North Shore of Lake Superior.
    A small island close to Seattle.
    Those were my places. That is where each and all of you will spread my dusty bones. Every single one of you has already met through me though not necessarily in person—I can tell you now which of you will notice what, who will become best friends, who will sit in the front and who will order first and that’s what pisses me off the most.
    I want to fucking be there with you.
    So Katherine, Jill, Laura, Rebecca and Marie—be there for me. Think about me. Throw not just my ashes, the dust of my life, into the wind—but throw a bit of yourself too and enjoy this time, these places, each other—as my final gift of thanks to you for all that you have given me, for the love we six women have shared, for the degrees of fineness that you added to a life that was as rich and full as anything I could have dreamed or made up.
    I love each and every one of you. That will never fade.
    Never.
    My traveling funeral better be grand.
    Now go.
    I am the whisper of the wind at every stop. I am there—with you.
    Always,
    Annie G. Freeman
    The tickets fall from the envelope like heavy chunks of wet, late-winter snow. A car rental slip for each city is pulled from its binder with the weight of the tickets and then a long list of hotels, a check for spending money and food, and one last note—handwritten—describing the best wine that is available in each location.
    Katherine laughs because Annie could always make a party out of death and then sprinkle her love of wine and song and fine friends all over it. Then she gathers up all the tickets and notes into a pile as if she is in Las Vegas and has just won the last deal at a blackjack table. She pushes all the papers in between her legs and she finishes up her glass of wine knowing now that perhaps the damn bra snapped loose for a reason and that no matter what happens in the next hour or day or week, she is now in charge of, and going on, a traveling funeral.
    She is.
    But then she looks down and the instincts of a mother, woman, attorney to get the detail in the midst of an emotion rise as fast as a bullet, and she sees that time is of the essence. Can she really do this? How can she do this? A flash of her own schedule makes her stomach clench. Her