At the Gravesite

 

“I’d rather be cremated,” he said.

We stood in a prairie graveyard, a late fall wind blew through
a faded red snow fence and a row of poplar trees,
their leaves already shaken free.

“I was taught cremation was unnatural,” I said. “In the church
I grew up in, it might have been illegal, now it seems sensible.”
“True,” he said, “and besides, how else to be buried
in different places at once — every lapping seacoast, if I had my say.”

“Me? near the old farm, that bend by the bridge on the Whitesand River,
and that wide open bay on Hornby Island, and the abandoned
forestry lookout my son and I hiked to, above Rocky Lake.”

“Of course it requires the good will of others, family can be lazy,
you could get thrown out of someone’s car window.”

“Anywhere along the Yellowhead is fine.” I said.
“What about people needing a place to visit?”
“All the better to have your ashes scattered over the country —
no one has to drive far.”

The pastor was gripping the lapels of his coat with one hand
and held a bible with the other, many words went up into the wind.

“I like the thought of my ashes caught in the grass,” I said,
“caught in the rain, absorbed by soil, my atoms ending up
in different forms, yet held, alive and seeing, in the Divine,
the all of me in a molecule, blinking out from the bloom
of an orange hawkweed,
growing in the ditch by our old cabin north of Edmonton.”

They were lowering my cousin into the earth with one of those
chrome-frame scaffold cranes. We watched as an older brother
threw a handful of dirt on the coffin.

“It looks like oblivion,” he said. “There’s nothing here
to convince me that consciousness survives.
It may be healthier to accept what’s apparent than to dream
of some kind of afterlife, whether on silver streets in golden clouds,
or in that orange flower of yours.”

“Oblivion is one truth. That there is a persistent mystery
begging attention at the heart of our existence is another.”

“The truth? We die.”
          “But we resist.”
“That’s evolution.”
          “That’s something built into the soul.”
“That’s animal survival.”

People were gathered around the bright-green fake-lawn carpet
that covered the mounds of dirt. They were singing,
Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,
and the wind under a slate sky was blowing hard.

“I’ll give you this,” he said, “there’s lots we don’t yet know about ashes,
lots we don’t know about the infinite number of ever-changing
information-bearing patterns.”
“Perhaps all part of one grand pattern?”
“I see where you’re going, but God is a problem.”

The pastor asked for a moment of silence. Under the grey light,
wet faces, shielded with scarves and raised collars, turned toward the casket.

“Any genuine experience of love is God.”
“Or,” he said, “any genuine experience of love is a physical phenomenon
exhibiting the fertile force of that fourteen-billion-year-old accident,
and that my grateful acknowledgment is on par with your worship of God.”

“You have a strong point — it leaves me, necessarily, to fall back on mystery.”

“There are imperious nihilists here, as you have adolescent crusaders there,
mirrors of each other, but the problem with many of you believers,
is that you think we nonbelievers lead shrunken lives,
sealed off from transcendent experience; but beauty, for instance,
enlarges life for me, as much as for you. My capacity for joy,
and grief, is not diminished because I believe in a material world.
You say God, I say physics, albeit, wondrous.”

“I think I say God before physics.
But I suppose we part ways here: for me, joy, sorrow, beauty, awe, all point
beyond a material world; awe, without an end, seems like dread,
potentially ending in despair. Although, that said,
dread, oblivion, the void, may also be a means to deeper seeing.

Some people were moving back to their cars, deliberate, slow bodies
lost in memories, lost in bewilderment, belief, unbelief, grace, pain.

“Suppose,” I said, “we were glimmerings in the mind of God (what love!)
even before that supermassive bang? Then, the quantum news
that we are one with everything around us, gives way
to a newer-older news, that you, me, all things, are at every moment,
in a relationship with that Mother force — God,
before we are in relationship with anything, with anyone.
How then should I approach the world and every living being,
if not with great reverence?

“Well, in this,” he said, “we are kin my friend, we live towards
the affections we hold, using different forms of navigation,
until some new information (revelation?) changes, modifies,
solidifies (maybe reverses?) this drift to disorder.”

We stood, our backs to the gusts, in a sort of silent covenant,
brothers, in a kind of searching wonder,
a wonder that only wind has the words to utter.

Car doors were open, but people were still in clusters,
holding one another, elbows held in palms,
hands folded in hands, arms linked, some embraced
as to shatter, as to deepen, the ice of grief,
some simply hugged,
if a hug can ever be called simple.