And what will she do with the giant picture?

Tuesday morning dawned chilly, but by the time I walked up the steps of the Universalist Church in southwest Minneapolis just after lunch, the sun had come out and my wool coat was too warm.

I was there for a sad occasion, the funeral of the husband of a dear friend. K is one of the Millerites, a group of five women who worked together at the Duluth paper back in the late 1970s and have reunited here in the Twin Cities. We get together a few times a year for dinner, wine, long talks and lots of laughter.

But for the last five years, the dinners have always included an update on the health of M, K's kind and intelligent husband, who had contracted an extremely rare form of cancer. He was treated successfully at the Mayo Clinic, but they were unable to eradicate the tumor, which had wrapped itself around his spinal cord.

For more than four years, he did well--he continued to work, which required a lot of travel; he remodeled his bathroom; they went to Scotland; he played trombone in three jazz ensembles.

It is also true that for part of those four years he required crutches to walk (he'd sling the trombone into a rucksack, and haul it to rehearsal on his back), and hand controls to drive his car. And it is sadly, poignantly true that he remodeled the bathroom to make it handicapped-accessible, anticipating a future in a wheelchair. None of this even began to slow him down...until right around Christmas, when the tumor came roaring back.

He was 55 when he died, an age that I guess at one time in my life I thought of as a venerable but now think of as, well, the age of many of my friends and, soon enough, myself. His hair was still red, his beard was still full, his eyes were still full of life. Ah, cancer.

What makes a good funeral? Was this a good funeral? It was incredibly sad. It was also happy. There was wonderful music--a brass combo, and a little jazz ensemble, playing the music that M loved and played himself. "Fanfare for the Common Man" made me tear up but I would not let myself weep because I knew if I began to weep it would quickly escalate into sobbing and then bawling and I would not be able to stop. The thing about funerals is, it makes you think of all the other funerals you've been to, and, if you are sentimental, all of the funerals that you might some day have to go to. I think of K as the first of us to become widows, but not the last. She is the one who will blaze that sad, sad trail.

In the front of the church was a giant photograph of M., blown up and placed on an easel. He smiled down at us, eyes happy. You could tell that he was looking with love at whoever took the picture. And you know that that person was K.

In front of the easel, on the floor, lay his trombone in its open case. That trombone just about killed me; it was the riderless horse.  The photo did, too; it reminded me of my sister's funeral, and of the problem that we faced later: What do you do with the picture? You cannot throw it away. You do not want to put it on your wall. No, you are doomed and blessed to possess a poster-sized beautiful smiling photo of your dead loved one forever.

My mother waited five or six years and then e-mailed all of us, asking if any of us wanted it. We did not. Neither does she; it's too sad.  It's now in the back of one of her closets, and some day, after she is gone, we will have to deal with its disposal.

So I looked at that big, smiling picture of M, and I thought, What will K do with it?

As if that is the biggest of her worries now.

The service was filled with music, and bells, and candles, and poetry. The minister was a strong, wise woman, who talked about how M, the engineer, loved to encounter problems and study them and gather tools and then dive in and figure them out. The one problem he could not solve, she said, was death.

And then his buddies got up to talk, two beefy men holding back their emotions, trying to be jocular, trying not to cry. One spoke, and the other stood silently, a hand on his friend's shoulder the whole time. It was heartbreaking to hear him tell funny stories about their fishing weekends, choking back tears, and they reminded me so much of Doug's fishing buddies that I flashed forward 100 years to Doug's funeral and pictured Chris (telling stories) and Dave (stoically standing by) and I very nearly let my tearing up slide into sobs.

And I looked over at M's tiny mother, who had hobbled in sadly, leaning on her cane, and it reminded me of Doug's mother, so sad at his brother's funeral, and that reminded me of Doug, so sad at his mother's funeral, and the whole afternoon was sunny and music filled and about as sad as it could be.

When it was over, the Millerites went down the basement to have coffee and bars and hug the widow, and I went back to work.