The year turned before I cleared their personal things from the apartment and put it up for sale. And it was that November before I was prepared for dealing with their ashes. I had resisted the memorial urns and fancy boxes pressed on me by the cremation society; my parents would have scoffed at them. But they would have liked to be in a place they thought of fondly. So Barbara and I rented a sailboat on the day after Thanksgiving and sailed on a brisk breeze from the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River into the Gulf of Mexico. We had with us the boxes of ashes and some red hibiscus and purple oleander blossoms we’d picked along the roadside. We reached along Fort Myers Beach to a spot near the south end, well offshore from the beach where Mom and Dad had taken me swimming and the dog Rusty had ridden in the inner tube. There I sprinkled the ashes and tossed the flowers after them and said a prayer.