Well, my grandfather's ashes are now resting next to my grandmother, Dorothy, his first wife. During the funeral, my cousin's line, "Make sure to give Grandma Dottie a big kiss from all of us," unleashed an audible round of sniffles throughout the church.

I'm not really certain where his second wife is buried. In Wisconsin, maybe. Next to her first husband, almost certainly.

I'd never been to a military funeral before. A line of very old men in VFW uniforms, standing in a line in a cold December cemetery, shooting their rifles into the air, is a moving sight to see. Even more so, the sound of "Taps" played on a trumpet. I didn't expect it. Without thinking about it, I guess "Taps" always held a kind of cartoony quality in my mind, not comical, but very distant, like "Camp Town Races." And then it seems very real at a funeral, both far away and painfully present like a newly dead loved one.

The thing that really got me, though, was after "Taps" was played, somewhere almost out of sight, across the cemetery, a second trumpet player played it again, like a mournful response carried on the wind, and I imagined it the beginning of a long military trumpet relay system, sending out word to the world of a passing, one ancient soldier at a time.