“I know this is a difficult question,” says LovelyFuneralDirector, “but have you thought about what you want to do with the ashes?”

She is a woman, by the way, this LovelyFuneralDirector. All three of the funeral directors we’ve met are women.  As are both registrars, the minister and the train driver on the Yorkshire to London Express. Sisters are doing it for themselves. We just need one of us to find a cure for cancer and we’ll be well away.

DearHeart thinks about the ashes.

Meantime, I tell LovelyFuneralDirector about Ma’s announcement recently, after a very nice birthday coffee and scone at the café in our local garden centre, that she wanted some of her ashes sprinkled there.

When LittleSis and I suggested this might not go down a treat with the people who owned the garden centre, Ma suggested that we try the old Dropping The Ashes Through Holes In Our Trouser Pockets trick that so many of us learnt whilst digging escape tunnels at our prisoner of war camps.  She’s worked it all out, has Ma.

LovelyFuneralDirector tells us that one client wanted their ashes scattered in Marks and Spencer’s. LFD did point out that this was basically saying that you wanted the ashes kept in the Henry in the cleaner’s cupboard, so probably not in the appropriate spirit.

We agree to come back to the difficult question of the ashes.  Actually, I get the impression that this barely registers on the difficulty scale alongside, say, trying to get hold of a doctor or the palliative care team or an oxygen delivery at Christmas.  Or of trying to sum up in just a few words your partner of twenty eight years.   Or of – well, any of this, really. It’s all bloody difficult. And I so wish that BraveHeart could see how bloody brilliantly DearHeart and her bloody amazing BigSister are dealing with it all because she’d be bloody, bloody proud.

Training note for Registrar#2.  You might consider in future starting the registration of a death by offering sympathies? And when told that the date of death is 24th December, some acknowledgment that, while no day is good, this is a truly rubbish day on which to lose your partner, might have been appreciated. Just a thought.