Burning, or burial?
It’s a real question, and it matters what I think because I am his friend, and I am one of the people who will care for him as he fights to stay alive in the face of a cancer that will win. This kind always wins, so the question matters, and it can’t wait, and there’s no walking around the topic to be polite.
It’s different when everybody at the table knows. The three of us, my two friends struggling with the impending loss of one, and me. Our dogs roam around, doing just the right things to distract us when we need it, just enough funny-obnoxious to make us smile, to pull us up, to remind us of the here and now. And we know we’re lucky that we have such friends who can talk so plainly and so honestly. It’s not that easy to do.
What I think is this, I say. I like to think that the natural world is being respected, and that the people and animals I love are into the soil. I dislike the falsehood of preserving a life that’s not preserved, of the ultimate chemo, poison going through your veins and the earth’s, forever more in you and the rivers and streams. And I don’t know, frankly, that I’ll always have the strength to stay away from that hole where those I’m missing lie tantalizingly close, preserved, gone from me in not quite every way, a prisoner in a capsule, unable to fulfill the last part of their job here and just waiting to be unearthed.
I like to think sometimes that my lost ones are out there, their ashes now microscopic parts of the current as it sweeps by, blowing past, down from the Himalayas and across the oceans. Sometimes I can feel them in the wind on my neck, when I’m missing them too much, when there’s nothing more to do but go stand outside and call for them, collar back, and wait for the rustling leaves to herald that energy, that power coming down from all around, that sweeps across me. It tells me they’re still here. Still here when I really need them to be.
This part where we’re losing each other, this “last third” where we’ll all lose each other eventually. We need to figure this out. We can’t just bury each other. We’ll need to sing each other to sleep, then release each other as we push up into those trees, fly up into those mountains, whip up into that wind that will travel the earth, to come down once in a while and brush across a neck just long enough to comfort, before leaving again into the atmosphere where we all will join again.