“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”

― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

When I think of ashes, I see them from a campfire.

They flicker and fade as they float up and away from the fire. Like glowing scraps of moth wings. Or the delicate paper pieces from a broken wasp’s nest.

They appear as the barely visible evidence of what once was. Scraps of ethereal filaments that exist in that liminal state between being and non-being; material caught in the very act of transforming into air.

Yet, when I held my father’s ashes, the box felt solid and surprisingly dense.

On Father’s Day we gathered near a stream, far in the back country of the Fraser Valley.  We each held a cedar branch as we said our prayers and words of remembrance and then we released his ashes back into the land.

We tossed our cedar branches in the creek.

They caught in back eddies and opposing currents but then, finally, mercifully, they broke free.

Leading the way to distant waters.