I’ve thought about reviving this blog about a thousand times these past few years,(what could be more foreign than the landscape I now find myself in?!), but there is SO MUCH to say that I’ve never known how to begin or where to start. It finally occurred to me today that the best place to start in situations like this, is at the end.
We scattered my husband’s ashes today.
It’s Father’s Day in the U.S. you see, and his wishes where to be cremated and scattered somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. It took awhile for those mountains to melt out this year, and with Father’s Day landing on June 21… it seemed the right time.
The right place was, no surprise, Crested Butte, CO. The boys and I drove in today around lunch, had a picnic at their favorite park and then hiked up a trail that I’ve always found total privacy on, gives beautiful views of the town, the valley, the mountains, and where I knew that the lupine flowers would be at full splendor. We weren’t disappointed, it was the right place indeed.
Bo died by suicide last October, and the labyrinth our lives became entangled in both before and after that event has been a dimly lit navigational nightmare. I get lost in it sometimes. Retracing each word to its original thought and corresponding action; looking in vain for the crossroads I didn’t realize we’d forked at that led me to be a blindsided stranger in my own life.
It is not to be found. After 2 years of searching, I feel I can say that with some certainty. It can’t be found because it isn’t singular. There wasn’t one fork in the road- there were hundreds of them. Thousands. Same number each of you reading this has by the way. All the micro-moments we walk through every day choosing light over dark –or visa versa. They culminate. We become what we practice, we become what we choose. Everyday. Every time. We become more of one or the other. Some days, more of both.
And in this season of my life, it is days like today, holidays – Father’s Day, when the labyrinthine overlap of “good” and “bad” and Life can be the most disorienting for me. Suddenly my own micro-choice is present and, for today, I choose to honor the light in my life. Easier to do when this is the picture that greeted me first thing this morning on my timehop app:
This is definitely a day in the light. I love his smile, how he’s holding both boys up, all three basking in the sun, in costume of course. 🙂 He seems strong. He seems healthy. He seems delighted with this moment in time.
Today, those boys took their dad in their arms and held him up to the sun instead. And while that sounds morose and depressing, it was actually wonderful. There were smiles and shouts of love and goodbye into the sky above us. There was a contentment and even joy with acknowledging that his body at least would be part of this staggering landscape from now on.
The trauma and horror in the labyrinth may or may not come out in future posts. Sometimes I think it would be helpful to myself and others in similar positions, sometimes not.
But today my sons scattered their dad’s ashes. For Father’s Day. And amazingly this too was a day completely in the light. And here we are at an ending to one section of our lives that is full of more grace and beauty than the circumstances themselves could ever have predicted. Such surprising goodness is always worth writing about…
Love, Jamie
(Following are images from our afternoon scattering Bo’s ashes. It was a beautiful experience for us, but I understand such pictures may be upsetting to others. Viewer discretion advised.)
