Rachel's ashes

Rachel's ashes are more than a keepsake for Ben Givens: they are the surviving material part of a shared promise, and the reason he can still imagine a future beyond his own death. Preserved for years, they connect his memory of Rachel Givens to a hoped-for flowering that his plan to die in the wilderness now puts at risk.

Preservation and the Rose Pact

Ben recalls the pact in his bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror. On a train from Mantua to Bressanone, he and Rachel had imagined that the ashes remaining from both of them would one day make a bed for roses: a red rose for him, a white one for her, growing together and intertwining over the years. The promise began as a romantic wish made by young lovers. As they grew older, they could be amused by it without letting it go.

Ben has kept Rachel's ashes in the hope that the pact might still be fulfilled. Their preservation gives his grief a concrete object and a future-directed form: the ashes are not only a remainder of the past but the substance of a possible shared memorial, one that would take years to grow into its imagined shape.

The Threat of Abandonment

The promise returns as Ben weighs the consequences of his intended suicide. He wonders whether dying by his own hand would mean that the roses could never grow. In that imagined alternative, his bones would bleach to dust in the sage lands and be scattered by Coyotes, while Rachel's ashes remained apart from the future he had once pictured for them.

The contrast makes his plan more than an end to his own suffering. He also imagines his dogs left to hunger, hardship, or death, and recognizes that he owes them more than abandonment in the empty canyons. His concern for the dogs and the threatened rose pact gives the planned death a series of consequences extending beyond his body; the ashes make one of those losses intimate and specific.

Meaning in the Narrative

Rachel's ashes hold together remembrance and possibility. The rose pact is sentimental in its origin, but Ben's decision to preserve the ashes shows that age and private amusement have not emptied it of meaning. At the moment he revisits it, the prospect of death exposes what the promise still asks of him: not merely to remember Rachel Givens, but to leave open the chance that their remains might one day be joined in the form they imagined.