Crematory Lunchbag

What do we want to keep when we lose someone we love?

When I picked up my father’s ashes from the funeral home four days after his death, what I got for the $1750 fee was: a few pounds of ashes and pulverized bones inside a rectangular plastic box about as big as a loaf of bread, ten death certificates proclaiming that my father had been 77 when he died of cancer of the throat, and a cloth bag just slightly larger than the box containing the cremains. The bag fit snugly around the box and had the official feel of an item made for a specific purpose. Somehow it…