I sent word of Cara’s death to those who loved her. Mom said I should do the planning. I was the only one, she’d said, who’d know what Cara would have wanted. “How would you want your funeral?” Mom asked. I was the next best thing to having Cara there to do it herself. So I planned my funeral during the second week of June in 2006, a hot and humid seven days when spring gave way to summer. I went to three flower shops to look for a casket topper: I wanted daisies. The daisies, I argued to the flower shopgirl, must not just top the casket, they must look wild on it, as if they were growing on the lid of the box where Cara lay. I’d bought the Trappist premier Premium casket in a cherry stain. The Trappist is handcrafted out of hardwood and has mitered joints and raised panels on mortised stiles and rails. The Trappist came with a hinged lid and an optional keepsake cross. The daisies on that casket would have to be chaotic and spill over peat moss or something green that might have grown in a fairy tale.
