Yesterday the ten of us took my mother in law Joan’s ashes to Cannon Beach here in Oregon. She had loved the beach, felt deeply alive there, and had requested her ashes be scattered there.
The day was bright but cold, way down in the 30′s with the wind-chill factor, and we huddled close like a football team at the water’s edge near Haystack Rock. We each shared a memory of Joan or a reading. There were tears, blowings of noses, lots of supportive side-hugs. Nobody’s ashamed to cry in this family, and that works well for me since I cry readily, and accept that about myself.
The ashes themselves were silvery and very fine, like a more refined form of the sand under our feet. Released into the water, they swirled white like smoke before dispersing and integrating into their new home. I looked at the vast ocean and sad faces and thought: How ancient all this is, experiencing a death and doing a ritual for it.
The details of the rituals vary, but expressing grief and mourning, displaying respect to the dead person and surrendering to a will greater than our own all come down to us through thousands of generations of ancestors. If I mentally erased our modern clothes, the ten of us could have been doing our ashes ritual long prior to Stonehenge. Death unites all peoples; advanced technology has no power over death. It always comes down in the end to a family crying and holding each other on a cold winter beach, dealing with the ashes of their loved one.
As a free-thinking Christian, I take comfort not just in God, the Holy Spirit and Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, but also the richness of our ancestors. I see them as having created footprints in which we are following, whether or not we realize it. Our ancestors endured millions of death, crying rivers of tears, showing us we can endure our grief, too.
The diamond-cut life emphasizes community, something our U.S. culture does not excel at. (In fact, lack of community and loneliness may often drive over-consumption). Two winters ago I took a friend grieving the loss of her father to a grief workshop led by Sobonfu Some, a joyous, dynamic woman from the Dagara tribe of western Africa. She led us in community-building and rituals from her indigenous culture that I recommend to anyone wanting a positive experience. My friend and I left Sobonfu’s workshop renewed, energized and as deeply alive as we had ever been. Her indigenous culture has rich gifts, including a connection to the ancestors, that I believe our culture badly needs.
Yesterday at the beach, after the ashes had entered the ocean, my brother-in-law Todd turned to me with open arms, looked me in the eye, and said, “I love you, Alison”. “I love you too, Todd,” I said right back, and we fell into a tight hug. This was new, and felt wonderful to me. The shared death and ashes experience had cracked our hearts open further to each other, and I had become more a part of the family, the tribe, than ever before.
This reminds me of when I spread the ashes of my father into the ocean, just out from Outer Banks, NC. We threw flowers into the water after the ocean embraced with it’s arms. He was always at peace on the water so it only made sense. I will never forget; the one Gull now on the water, 40 miles into the Atlantic, looking back at us as we set on for the shore.