The past week has been Hellish in the Tar Heel State.

Dare to venture outside and Mother Nature tosses a wet woolen blanket over you and cranks up the furnace. The heat index — how hot the heat and humidity make you feel — has topped 105 several days running.

And so it is that at 7:30 p.m. this first week of summer, the sidewalks are empty of the usual parade of runners, walkers and dogs leading their people through the neighborhood.

Everyone has retreated to the great indoors.

And here, in the air conditioning, time disappears, endless days oozing like treacle into one another —  Sunday into Monday, Monday into monotony,  Tuesday into what day is it anyway and will I ever be able to go outside again?

This is the third day of this weather-imposed house arrest. I’ve spent the time doing a little reporting and writing, begun training for a virtual editing gig, and proofread the large-type hymnal for the V.A. chaplains. My filing is done. My desk is tidy. The floors are swept, the fridge is clean. I’m caught up on the laundry.

I’m busting out of here tomorrow before I do something desperate — like scrubbing the grout with a toothbrush.

With a friend acting as lookout, I recently scattered most of Joe’s ashes near the dorm where we met at the University of Oregon.

A campus official said this act of love was technically not allowed, then advised us in a whisper to be discreet. It had a subversive feel, an appropriate nod to the zeitgeist of the 1970s when we were in Eugene. I am happy I will be able to pay respects whenever I visit the U of O, and that’s important to me.

More important is that Joe’s wishes have been honored. Well, mostly, anyway.

I still have a couple tablespoons of him left.  I’m apparently not ready after 141 days to let go for good.

Well-meaning friends have suggested having these last ashes made into a pendant or pin I can wear forever near my heart, or even into a pretty paperweight for my desk.

Online, the suggestions are freakish and macabre.

For a price, you can add your loved one’s ashes to ink and get a memorial tattoo, turn them into a shotgun shell, blast them into space or press them into a 33 rpm record with a personalized audio remembrance. You can mix them with paint for a portrait or use them to have the deceased’s likeness formed into a 3D bust urn.

I’m not ready to let go right now. But the natural order of things dictates that someday, I must.

And when I do, no freak-show, for-profit nonsense will be involved. It will simply be as Joe wished: with song, prayer and a final flamboyant fling to the wind.