“When people die, they are sometimes put into coffins, which means that they don’t mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots.

But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash, and I couldn’t ask at the crematorium, because I didn’t go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air, and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.”

—from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon