My mom wanted her ashes spread in the river at her favorite campsite. So after the memorial service, my family and some of her close friends made the trip south from Havre, into the foothills of the Bear’s Paw mountains. Actually, now that I think about it, I am not certain whether that particular campsite had special meaning for her. It could have. Though sending us there may actually have been her last act of organizing a gathering of the people she loved. Throughout my life, the times I was with that group of people, she was almost always the one who brought us all together. It would be like her to plan her funeral as her last chance to get us together. As it turns out, those few moments at the campsite were the last time I saw most of them. I don’t think that was quite what she had in mind, but she did get us together.
In any case, she had been planning the day for as long as I can remember. I was about 20 years old when she heard me play Jeff Beck’s arrangement of Amazing Grace and her immediate response was to tell me she wanted me to play it at her funeral. Perhaps that sounds morbid. It wasn’t. She wasn’t planning to die. Not at the time anyway. She was planning a celebration of a life well-lived. So when it became clear she only had a few weeks left, I sat down with her and asked for details. I knew it was important to her that we get it right. And I started practicing my guitar part.
The journey to the campsite to inturn her in the stream was not one of the details she had given me. She told my sister about that. Each of us, it seems, had been entrusted with different parts of her plan. So after the service (which was the part I had been entrusted with), I could only follow along until we got to the bridge she had specified as the site for scattering ashes. I waited for someone to do whatever it was they had been instructed to do, but when the moment came, my sister couldn’t. She handed the urn to me and asked me to do it. She had been in denial about my mom’s quickly deteriorating health, so I suspect she hadn’t listened to the instructions about the ashes. I don’t think she wanted to think about it.
Without clear instructions, I nervously tried to do what I thought mom would have planned. I found a nice place along the riverbank, where everyone would be able to see from the bridge, took a small amount of her ashes and gently poured them into the stream. I wasn’t far enough out though and they quickly settled to the bottom in the slow-moving water along the bank. That could not have been what she wanted. So I found a spot where I could get a little farther into the current and tried again. This time the ashes caught in the flow and a silver wisp of my mom – as though it were her spirit – swept elegantly downstream as sunlight filtered through fluttering leaves on the surrounding trees and danced on the rippling water. I watched the little mist go, wondering if she had planned this ethereal scene too. Was that why this particular bridge was so important to her? She meandered in the current, passing under the bridge, swirling in a few eddies along the way, and before disappearing in the swelling flow, darted around and through the legs of my niece and nephew who were playing in the water, downstream a bit, on the other side of the bridge. They were too young to understand why this group of sad people were just standing around at a mountain campsite in nice clothes. And they were young enough to know better than to let an opportunity pass them by when they could be enjoying what their world had to offer. They had taken the break in action as a chance to play in the cool mountain water on a warm July day.
I was struck by the symbolism of the momentary wisp of my mother’s physical presence washing over, around, and past these children who were busy doing their thing – children who looked like her and me and so many of the other people on the bridge, but mostly like themselves. And, for perhaps the first time in my life, I had a sense of being an interconnected member in an ancestral lineage.
As a Westerner, I am rarely afforded the opportunity for a multi-generational perspective, but watching the movement of the ashes triggered an otherworldly experience for me. It was like a movie, zooming out to a completely other level. I had this sort of transcendent sense that I was watching my mother’s gifts (as well as her pain) being passed down to her grandchildren. But I also had a sense those same gifts (and pain) had come down to her through a whole chain of ancestors who preceded her – and that, like them, my sisters, my niece, my nephew, and I were vessels through which that inheritance flows to coming generations as well.
I expected the spell to be broken at any second by one of the dozen parents on the bridge, sure to be horrified seeing human remains coming in contact with the children. It wasn’t. When I finally resurfaced from my reverie, I looked up to see that no one else had witnessed what had just happened. They were all busy doing something else – oblivious to the fact they had just missed what we had all come for. That is another common weft among many of my ancestors.
My ancestral inheritance, as it turns out, had been very much on display that day. I had been too in the midst of grief to make the connections at the time. But, on reflection, perhaps what I had been experiencing throughout that day prepared me for the transcendental experience at the river’s edge.
During the service and meal that followed, people I had never met kept coming up and introducing themselves to me, so they could tell me about things I mom had done for them. It seemed each time I stopped moving for a moment, another person was quietly saying ‘excuse me, I just wanted to let you know how much your mom meant to me…’ Each story was another example of a way my mom had met particular needs of particular people. They were not vague gestures at abstract characteristics – not just empty platitudes about her niceness or her happiness, her penchant for mid-day naps under her desk at work or her extensive collection of children’s toys. They were all personalized and specific stories of people who had been seen – and loved.
One that stands out in my memory is a family that pushed their son over in his wheelchair just before we entered the sanctuary for the start of the service and said ‘We wanted you to meet Jace. Your mom did so much for him.’ They didn’t even need to say that much, for me to know exactly what they meant. I recognized her work. You see, for the last 2 decades of her life, my mom worked for an organization that served families with children who had significant mental, physical, and developmental impairments. She directed an office that matched children with specialists who could diagnose and tailor therapies to their needs – and then coordinate services to meet those needs. Even if his chair didn’t bear all of the characteristics of one designed for a person with immobilizing physical impairments, his rigid posture, the stiff bend of his wrists, the angle of his neck, and the slightly distant expression on his face told me Jace was a young man for whom she had advocated A LOT. In rural Montana, services were scarce, policies were rigid, and institutions were often unkind. I had heard many stories of frustration over dealing with those barriers. If not for my mom’s persistence, parents like Jace’s likely wouldn’t get through all of the red tape to get what their kids needed. My mom helped them find ways to do what they needed to do for their child – and that is a big enough deal they needed me to meet Jace as a testament to her legacy.
It is not a legacy embossed on stone archways. It inheres in people she helped to claim more of their humanity.
I had seen this all before. When my father died, his memorial service had been standing-room only. And as more and more people who had known him learned of his unexpected death, gifts began to pour in for my family – my suddenly single mom and her three children (all under the age of 9). For weeks they poured in. Missionaries sent us money. Missionaries, overseas, sent money – to US. And for at least a decade afterward, I continued to run into people who, when they learned I was Brent’s son, would tell me of the life-changing impact he had had on them. He worked in student affairs at a small college, directing something like an office of career services. He too, matched people unsure what they were seeking with needed resources. He too saw people and met their needs. Individually and without fanfare.
Aside from a handful of personal mementos that decorate my house and a few others, neither of my parents left a physical trace in the world. No buildings bears either of their names. Textbooks do not archive their thoughts, theories, or models. Neither is among the approx. 1.5 million people with a wikipedia page about them. Both were cremated – per their request – so there isn’t even a physical marker representing a space their remains occupied before they became, as Cornel West says, the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. The wisps of their physical being in the world have long since been swept downstream. But the impacts they had on people reverberate. They left the world a better place than they found it.
I have had the same experience with people who knew my grandfather. When they found out I was Ralph’s grandson people have stopped what they were doing, first to tell me stories of his impacts on their lives, then to find out what I needed.
I suspect I would hear the same sorts of things if I traced further into other generations. This is my ancestral inheritance.
I have always known, I suppose. There are only two poems I have ever memorized: Silverstein’s “My Beard”, because it is funny, and Shelly’s “Ozymandias”, because I felt it. I was only 17 years old the first time I read Ozymandias, as an assignment for an English class. Even so, it resonated with something deep in me about how worthy legacies are never the ones stamped in stone. Reflecting on that riverside moment has helped me see that my parents were among my ancestors who were the antithesis of Ozymandias. But I always knew that – even if it took 40-some years to figure it out.
I used to think my gifts belonged to me – that they were for my fulfillment. But the more I reflect on that moment with my mom’s ashes in the stream, the more I realize they are not mine. They don’t belong to me. I belong to them. It is a responsibility that, at times, seems daunting. I just hope to be a faithful vessel in my lineage for our ancestral inheritance.