the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt ten)

from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

In the morning, Wright’s workmen made plain wooden boxes for the dead, and Edwin Cheney loaded one small box with the remains of his two children into a car for the return trip to Chicago. Mamah’s body remained with Wright. The rest is best told in his own words, as he recorded the events in the Autobiography. “Black despair preceded a primitive burial in the ground of the family chapel. Men from Taliesin dug the grave deep. . . . I cut her garden down and with the flowers filled the strong plain box of fresh white pine to overflowing. My boy John, coming to my side now, helped lift the body and we let it down to rest among the flowers that had grown and bloomed for her. The plain box lid was pressed down and fastened home. Then the plain, strong box was lifted on the shoulders of my workmen as they placed it on our little spring-wagon, filled, too with flowers . . . we made the whole a mass of flowers. It helped a little.”