Ashes

[skonen_blades]

With a Johnny Appleseed sweep of my arm, I make a summertime snowfall on father’s day in 2007 high up the side of Elephant Mountain in Nelson BC. I’m scattering my dad’s ashes a year and a half after his death. I’m surprised at how white they are.

With this decisive sweep, I’m causing the last vestige of my father’s material existence to switch over into an unseen spiritual influence spun from memories and imagined advice.

He is Kenobi now.

The extremely fine ash hangs in the air like the ghost of a rainbow fading.

My brother, his wife and I are standing on Pulpit Rock, the place where my father requested his ashes to be scattered. It’s a rocky outcropping a kilometer up the mountain that overlooks Nelson from across Kootenay Lake.

It’s been a hard climb and a lifetime in the making. It goes surprisingly smoothly considering how emotional my brother and I are.

If seeds are the symbol of a dormant beginning of life, I feel like I’m planting their opposite. I’m sowing ends. There are tiny chunks of bone in the ash that powder at a touch. I wasn’t expecting his remains to be so delicate. I’m sure many women said that same about him when he was alive.

It’s chalk dust from a blackboard, leftovers from a teacher. I thought I might be horrified to touch it but it’s comforting. I was expecting a Mount St. Helen’s grayness but this is icing sugar.

With the dispersion of these remains, my brother and I, two half sisters, writing, many pieces of stained glass, and memories in people’s heads are now the only evidence of his existence.

My brother and I are his echoes underlying our own voices, javelins he hurled into the future and rising sons.

I have a deeper understanding of the word ancestor now. I understand how deeply one person can affect another. I understand the impact one person’s life can have on the world. I miss my father but now he will never be gone.


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