Not wishing this funeral to resemble in any way that earlier, nightmarish experience, my grandmother's casket was closed during her service. I wanted to remember her the way she had been--full of life and love--not pale, cold and made up to look like a parody of herself.

She was laid to her final rest at Green Meadows Mausoleum, an imposing, three story edifice built in the early 1920s. The interior was extremely impressive; columned, walled and floored with variegated marble in black, green, pink and white. Many of the inner corridors seemed to stretch away endlessly, the walls tiered to receive as many as five caskets, one atop the other, from floor to ceiling. It was so cool, quiet and peaceful within the walls of that gigantic tomb that under other, less tragic circumstances, I could have wandered about the place for many hours.

There were few mourners to stand with me in my time of grief. We had no other relatives and grandmother had been so busy caring for our home and for me these past years that she rarely had time for outside social functions or for keeping up with but a few friends, while I myself had literally no one whom I could have called a friend. The church service was thankfully uneventful and the minister said but a few words prior to the actual entombment, as throughout the service I had been feeling increasingly faint and dizzy; the emotional trauma of the past few days finally beginning to take its toll on me.

After the others had passed their condolences to me one final time and quietly slipped away, I slumped down, suddenly exhausted, on a marble bench across from grandmother's flower bedecked casket and lost myself in thought. Amid the silent, meandering memories of the time spent with my grandmother, I seemed to feel the presence of a thousand sleeping souls pressing in on my conscience.

I was gradually becoming more and more weary as I sat in that quiet tomb and the cloying scent of the flowers before me had begun to make my head swim. I rose to my feet and surprised myself by staggering slightly so that I had to catch my balance by leaning against the near wall for a moment. I realized that my fatigue was now obviously draining away my limited resources of strength and steadying myself, I went in search of someplace to perhaps splash a bit of cool water on my face.

At the end of the corridor, nearly hidden from view, I found an alcove wherein a small door labeled 'Flower Room' was located. Opening the door, I discovered a room no larger than an average closet, illuminated by a bare bulb of low wattage. Inside was a small sink and several long handled poles used for inserting vases of flowers into the round receiving rings of the higher crypts, along with an assortment of the conical shaped vases for the flowers to be placed in.