This essay first appeared in Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Essay, Volume 9, Number 2.

Feldman Brothers’ mortuary of Denver called two days after Seth’s death to say we could come to get his ashes.  My husband Kurt and I left for the mortuary with the idea of driving to scatter some of our son’s ashes at Gold Mountain, the Colorado resort where he and his fiancée Kristen were to have married in five months.

With the box of grey powder unceremoniously by my feet on the passenger side of the rental car, I decided I wanted to take pictures of the wedding site, so we stopped at a Safeway to buy a disposable camera.  An hour outside of Denver, we drove through snow newly falling over aspens.  Seth had been a student at the University of Colorado, and visiting him from our home in Seattle, Washington, we had hiked the forests with him.  We had sat, all of us, on rock ledges in spring and in fall, quiet and dwarfed, overlooking the Continental Divide.

In another hour, Kurt and I spotted the lake, a patch of silver grey through the pine trees at the foot of a lodge.  We pulled off the road into a driveway that led to a parking lot. In the grey, bitter cold, I took the camera out of the plastic grocery bag and handed it to Kurt. I opened the lid of the mortuary’s black plastic box and saw a metal disc atop my twenty-five-year-old son’s ashes, the tag that must have gone with his organ-harvested body to the morgue.

I carefully poured some of the ashes into the plastic grocery bag and replaced the metal tag on top of the remaining ashes.  For a moment, I felt my fingers next to Seth’s little boy fingers sifting ash.  I had brought him some volcanic ash from Mt. St. Helens in 1980 when his older sister and I were caught twenty miles from the mountain’s erupting peak.  A four-year-old then, he had spent the day baking a cake with his dad to celebrate when his sister’s first-grade class returned.  I fingered that grey metal tag again, and remembered my car, my clothes, everything covered in grey ash, how it contrasted with the blue, green, red and yellow candies my son had used to decorate his cake’s icing.  I could not believe this powder I touched was my son, these ashes lighter than my tears.  The day I drove home from the elementary school trip that had brought us inside an incorrectly calculated danger zone, I wanted nothing more than to arrive home with my daughter and kiss my worried son. Now I wanted nothing more than to have kissed him at his wedding.

Kurt and I knew the area of the intended wedding ceremony site by the huge stone sculpture Kristen had described, set so its round central opening made a window to the lake.  Beyond the white teepee changing rooms for those using the natural hot springs dotting the landscape, we saw steam rising around more sculptures.  At the land’s point, I knelt and took the bag of ashes from my pocket.  I was going to leave the ashes at the base of a low bush.  Perhaps it seemed Biblical.  Perhaps it just didn’t seem right to put the ashes out in the open.  I wanted them to remain for at least a little time here where my son would have exchanged vows and his family and friends would have stayed the weekend.

 Kurt backed away a few feet, camera to his eye.  As I put the ashes between bare branches, I worried that the constant wind would blow them back at me, and I would carry them on my clothes instead of leaving them where it felt right to leave them. But the wind died away.  And when I stood up, the sun quickly burned through the clouds dramatically warming the air. I was receiving brilliant sunrays into my solar plexus, throbs and throbs of them directly into my chest.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I cried and I chanted, thanking Seth for being my son, for all that he brought to my life, for this sun and something special happening as I returned his ashes to the earth.  Then the clouds around the sun broke further apart, and we saw the shape of an orca, like ones Seth got to see the many summers of his childhood, an orca like the one on the insignia he proudly painted onto his hand-made kayak.  Then another orca shape formed in the sky beside the first one, slightly smaller, an offspring. Kurt took a picture of this sky.

Overhead, a pair of ravens soared in the wind. I thought of the spring afternoon when a newly driving Seth had come home telling us ravens dive-bombed him as he walked in the neighborhood he visited.  They must have been nesting and protecting their young, I told him. Now, though I felt in the presence of a higher power and received glorious happenings with great thanks, I could not help but think, “If only I could have protected my son.”

And even here, I fell silently into my daily what-ifs.  What if I’d talked to Seth one more time about the dangers of snowboarding? What if I’d asked him if he was going to wear a helmet? I’d pummeled myself with these questions since the afternoon our family took Seth off life support, even though I had had no idea he was going to go snowboarding.  And I kept having an idea about massage. What if I’d offered to pay for several massages when he was stressed from moving and starting a new job? Would his body have kept better control when he was gaining momentum down the slope that had iced up suddenly as temperatures dropped?  I went on to the next question. What if I hadn’t called him before he left for the ski trip? Maybe he was preoccupied with something I had said over the phone as he hurriedly packed to make his plane.  What if I’d never divorced his father?

When I’d spoken the litany out loud, Kurt had said, “What if you hadn’t had a hair cut last week?” hoping to let me know that I must not blame myself.   But he told me he was running through his own lists of what-ifs:  What if he hadn’t met us and married me?  Maybe Seth would have had a different stepfather who wouldn’t have encouraged him with a drafting table, and he wouldn’t have gone into the University of Colorado’s architectural design program and he wouldn’t have been snowboarding at Breckenridge on December 27, 2000.  In death’s wake, it is easy to find yourself bartering away the very things you treasured about someone’s life–that it intersected with yours and brought beloved others to you.

The ravens soared.  Even with our sorrow and tortured thoughts, we felt a miraculous calm at the center of all things.  It seemed right that we had brought the ashes here. It felt as if Seth could settle into a new existence now that his love with Kristen had in some way been honored here.  For a time, I shushed the what-if part of my mind.  When the sun followed us back to the car, I felt Seth saying, “Thanks for coming here.  I love you. I am with you.”

Two days later, we scattered the rest of Seth’s body into the Discovery Bay waters he loved in Port Townsend. Seth’s sister, father and I paddled into the bay in a neighbor’s canoe while Kristen paddled Seth’s wooden kayak with the orca toward the Olympic Mountains they hiked, the mountains where they thought they would teach their children love of the outdoors.  Seth’s stepmother, Kurt and Seth’s half-brothers, Kristen’s parents and sisters and brother-in-law, and many uncles and aunts watched from the shore, flowers in their hands, each sprinkled with Seth’s ashes.  I had placed the ashes left after Gold Mountain in a wooden box that had come once as a gift.

I watched Kristen release some of the ashes. She stopped though, closed the box, and paddled over to our canoe. She said she couldn’t do anymore.  It was my turn.  She turned and paddled closer to the mountains, away from the shore. I held this small handmade box with whale totems on it upside down over the side of the boat.  Emily, Jim and I watched the ashes swirl into the water, a funnel touching down. Kristen took in the Olympics, timeless and large. We watched her seeming to resolve not to touch down emotionally, not until she was ready.

I turned back and I saw a necklace of flowers moving from the shoreline toward us.  The people Seth loved stood at the water’s edge, hands empty. I remembered watching Seth from this beach access on the day he launched his kayak, smiling broadly because it floated.  He paddled away breaking the water’s surface no more than necessary. I remembered him paddling the same way years later beside me in a kayak he’d rented so a group of us could experience the quiet movement he loved.  Now all of us sensed what it would feel like to miss this young man forever.

Back inside this house by the bay, this house that Seth had designed for us as a high school project when he was 17, I studied the photographs he took of the Grand Canyon, the Brooklyn Bridge and Times Square.  I touched the glass covering the rendering of the house he made for his freshman year architecture studio class and presented to me for Mother’s Day.  I took ceramic cups and saucers from the cabinet, a birthday gift from him. He and Kristen had mailed me the fragile objects.  How could everything be here in one piece but him?

I looked out the clear glass of the house’s side door at the uncovered deck, and I remembered the warm fall day I had stood there after Seth left for his freshman year at college.  The builders had not been able to start it much before he left for Boulder, so I had phoned him often with my questions:

“Why is there a roof over part of the deck but not over the place I am standing? Have the builders made a mistake?” I asked him.

“Mom,” he answered patiently because he knew that I had never been able to hold his blueprints in my mind, “the uncovered part is your sun deck. The covered one is for rainy days.”

The next day, I stood on the uncovered porch watching the sun as it rose from behind trees. Later I watched it set over Discovery Bay and thought of my boy.  I did not look away from the rays that teased me into saying hello as if Seth were waving to me, the rays that drew me from the absence thudding across my chest like fallen struts.

A few weeks later, after we returned to Los Angeles, I had the film from Gold Mountain developed, and we saw that the scene Kurt captured was as we remembered it:  sun breaking through a slab of grey; orcas curved around the glow.

I began a ritual of getting up each day at dawn and watching the sun travel up the sky.  When the weatherman reminded us that warm air lying over cooler air causes instability and storms, I knew that happy memories covering my cold grief would never let me rest.

All day and into the night, I read everything I could about death.  I read everything I could about grief.  I looked at pictures of my son from his childhood to his young adulthood as if I would find a hint that this would someday happen.  I looked at pictures and he was there in front of me, vibrant and full of love.  How could I know that he was dead and fully believe in his existence?

I searched the poems I’ve written about him since he was a little boy.  I read lines from 1978:

Rowing on Lake Union

On water each crust I feed the birds
falls apart like reason.
The duck’s wake resembles ours;
behind us the way grows wider.
My son says he wants to wear his head on backwards for awhile
to see the last chicken pock fading
between his shoulders, the birthmarks
persistent in their shapes. Secrets
gather in the hollow of his back
like legs budding on a tadpole.

Going forward we celebrate the clouds
billowing after their weight,
the sun’s sure fire against the blue.

As we row there is a squeak in the oarlock;
the boat fields our weight on water.
Death unsticks from my dreams now,
leaves with her slippers flapping.

Was death the secret in the hollow of my three-year-old son’s back?  Was that squeak in the oarlock a reminder that the weight we know as life is as easily dispersed as clouds?

I read the words of a shaman named Martin Prechtel in an issue of The Sun. “If you are able to feed the other world with your grief, then you can live where your dead are buried.”  Although he’d never lived in Los Angeles, I imagined Seth’s ashes traveling from the Northwest waters of Discovery Bay out into the Straits of Juan de Fuca and then into the Pacific, following me home.

“If this world were a tree, then the other world would be the roots–the part of the plant we can’t see, but that puts the sap into the tree’s veins,” Prechtel said in the magazine interview. “The other world feeds this tangible world–the world that can feel pain, that can eat and drink, that can fail; the world that goes around in circles; the world where we die. The other world is what makes this world work. And the way we help the other world continue is by feeding it with our beauty.”

Out on the water with three-year-old Seth, I felt weightless. Death had left for the moment.

In the early mornings, I read about grief. I read that I would survive this loss if I could make it meaningful.  I read that I must live fully to honor my son because he would have wanted it so. I read that although the pain won’t disappear, I would be able to some day live with it.  All of this sounded reasonable to me, but ever since the clouds became orcas, I was not after reason.  I was after more magic.

I went to see a shaman.  She invited me to lie on a massage style table, and she told me as she held my head in her hands that Seth has work to do where he is, that he has many guides, Pythagoras among them, and he is learning.  I smiled knowing how cool he’d think that was.

I thought of his dad’s words read by the Rabbi at the funeral:  “As an architect Seth drew straight lines.  He also knew that enough straight lines connected together form a strong circle.”  She told me we have been here together many times and I was the first one to leave the last time.  I remembered my own words in the eulogy:  “happiness and sorrow, joy and grief, having and letting go are also one tree, which Seth knew so well how to appreciate.”

He is sad, the shaman said, to see us all so unhappy but he wants me to know I was the perfect mother and he loves me.  I thought of Seth at 16 when he scored a perfect score on both the written and road test for his driver’s license.  After driving me home, he stood opposite me in the kitchen and said, “You know there is no rule you can make now that I can’t break. You have to rely on the fact that you did a very good job raising me and I believe that you did.” I lay on her table and cried for my son.

I cried about the summer when Seth, a college sophomore, brought home a young woman he met at his Seattle summer job and wanted to court her by making chocolate chip cookies. But I hadn’t had kids living at home in awhile and didn’t have my pantry stocked.  He brought her home to share the treat that he had always been able to make from stock on hand, and it wasn’t there.  “Not a big deal,” he said, but to me it remained one–he held the idea that his mother’s shelves were always stocked, even when they weren’t.

Back in Los Angeles, every day in the late afternoon, I began to flip through the pages of a chili cookbook that used to be Seth’s.  I imagined him stirring pots, bringing out a crowd the way he did when he lived in his college apartments. Some of those afternoons as I stood at the edge of dining room table flipping through that cookbook, I could feel Seth’s arm next to mine, his breath blowing my hair.  On one of these afternoons, I remembered the way my bed shook at our house on Discovery Bay one night when there had been no earthquake and my cat, who sometimes stretches against my mattress, was not with us.

I thought of lines from “In a Dark Time” by Theodore Roethke, the poet I was studying all those years ago when my son and I rowed on Lake Union:
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

During the first months after Seth’s death, I made recipes from his cookbook and rejoiced in the familiar feeling of my boy cooking beside me. I did not yet know a way to feed the other world or how to understand always, though I believed that always was with us as we walked in the cold to Seth’s wedding site and left his ashes where he would have wanted us to.  I believed in always when the sun broke through clouds and warmed us.