For today’s piece, I talked with the husband and son of Patricia Walter about her life and how they’ve adapted their mourning:

She had hoped to donate her body to science. But when Patricia Walter died from Covid-19 on April 11 at U.C. Davis Medical Center, the family was told that wouldn’t be possible right now.

So, instead, Ms. Walter will be laid to rest on the 50th Earth Day. She was 86.

She will be buried in a low-impact, biodegradable wicker coffin. Her grave will be marked with a field stone in a meadow overlooking the section of a cemetery in Placerville reserved for pets.

“She was into all things natural — animals, trees, birds,” Keith Walter, her husband of almost 65 years, said. “So it seems appropriate.”

He lives not far away in Fair Oaks, in a small condo with Ty, a dog, and Tig, a cat.

Ms. Walter grew up in New York State, where she and Mr. Walter met at a mixer not long after they graduated from high school. She wore a red dress, Mr. Walter recalled, and he saw her from across the room. He took her for pizza after the dance and, he said, pausing to laugh quietly, “the rest is history.”

Friends and family members remembered Ms. Walter — she answered to Pat, Patti or “Hey you” — as a vivacious “people person,” a woman who had a way of making you “feel like you were the most important person in the world whenever you were around her,” as one family member posted on an online memorial guest book.

[Read more about how families have grieved in the pandemic.]

She was beloved by colleagues, as well, said Keith Walter Jr., her oldest son, who also lives in Fair Oaks. He told me his mother was one of the few mothers he could recall who worked full time.

The family lived with Ms. Walter’s parents while she worked as an administrative assistant to the dean of what is now Binghamton University’s engineering school.