Tricycle | Awake in the World

Six of us carried Molly’s body up the narrow, twisting staircase, an embrace so intimate and sweet that the experience remains vivid for me months after her death. Her passing was expected and uneventful, like many I’ve witnessed—a slow withdrawal, a growing acceptance of the inevitable, and a quiet release.
Molly had struggled for four and a half years with advancing brain cancer and with the effects of the drugs that slowed its progress. Her body now rested in a hand-built coffin, cut from cedar at a nearby sawmill and reassembled for her only hours ago at the top of the house, in the bedroom that she’d abandoned several months before, no longer able to negotiate the climb. She and her husband, Craig, had built that large room and the attached deck six years earlier—she had loved it there.