Moodswing - Daffodils and a tree

I hadn’t thought that human ashes would make for good sandbox filler, but I’m not Tamara. I just wish I were, as she is always thinking of things that would never occur to me. It would never have occurred to me, for example, to hand my kids the ashes of their father in two neat sand pails, complete with shovels, so they could pour them at the base of an oak tree that had just been planted to memorialize him. How brilliant is that? I thought as I watched Max’s two children sprinkle his remains over the 42 daffodils — Max would have been 42 today — planted around the tree.

I know cremated remains are not exactly sand, and the base of a tree is not exactly a box, but if there is one thing you can certainly say about Tamara, it’s that you’ll never find her confined to a box. Just the other day I was at her place gawking in wonderment at the innovative system of checks and balances she had devised on her dry-erase calendar to deal with the myriad of doctors appointments, child-care accommodations and countless other ministrations that come with the crap basket of dealing with a dying husband. Wow, I thought, I need to get a dry-erase board. I need to check and balance.

And when I used to watch her little boy Griffin while she was at the hospital tending to Max, I liked to open all the utensil drawers in her kitchen and just marvel at her mastery of organization. It must have been how she held it together while her world was falling apart. Her pantry was a wonder to behold, too, everything perfectly arranged and ready to remind you of your options: Rice-A-Roni or elbow macaroni? SpaghettiOs or ravioli?

My own pantry is a wasteland of hurricane-relief rejects peppered with soy-sauce packets and ramen seasonings. There is stuff in there that is just there – weird wayward staples, like what the hell is bulgur wheat? I know it must be food, if not for me personally then at least for the colony of boll weevils that are no doubt thriving inside; I just don’t know how to utilize it as an ingredient in anything. But I keep the box in my pantry because at one point probably decades ago I thought to buy it for some reason, and you never know when that reason may show itself again, and I don’t want to be caught without the right box of bulgur wheat when that happens.

But if Tamara had a box of bulgur wheat in her pantry, you would know immediately what it was, because it would be grouped in a subsection of like-themed boxes and you would be able to discern by its surroundings the category into which it fell. Seriously, Tamara is a master. Every month her counters and tabletops reflect the season in themed accessories, such as the butter-spreaders with ceramic handles in the shape of stacked jack-o’-lanterns, or winter-themed accessories, such as snowflake-patterned place mats, or whatever theme for whatever other season Max had marveled doctors by surviving. Seasons always end, though.

The first time I saw Max was at my daughter’s fifth birthday party. He had eyes like a spaniel’s, they were so gentle and sweet, and he had a sardonic sense of humor that heightened his charisma, even later on through the indignities of his cancer. “A few months ago we were just two parents on the playground watching our kids,” he smiled wryly at me as I helped him back into his hospital bed after a bathroom run one night. “Now look at us,” he continued as he adjusted his many tubes and wires. “You’re my diaper buddy.”

But the first night I saw him he was cracking wise with the other dads while his pregnant wife communed among the balloon animals with the kids and other mothers. At initial glance they look like any other couple, but it turns out that Tamara and Max could not be categorized just because they were sitting in the same pantry among a bunch of like-themed boxes.

For one, Max was born with ambiguous genitalia, an “unfinished girl” is the box the doctors tried to put him in, and for the majority of his life he lived as a female named Judy. This is who he was when he met Tamara, but of course it’s not really who he was, and if love is good for anything it’s good for bringing you out of the box.

And now Max is gone, but then again not really. Just before his 7-year-old daughter Alder began to sprinkle her father’s ashes over his memorial, she had read a list of things she loved about him, called “The 10 Good Things About My Daddy.” “Daddy buried me in the sandbox once,” she read, “Daddy was great at playing,” and on she continued, her words dancing through the air like daisy petals in the breeze, “Daddy is going to grow daffodils and a tree ...”

Hollis Gillespie authored two top-selling memoirs and founded the Shocking Real-Life Writing Academy (www.hollisgillespie.com).