It’s been seven months since my father passed from Covid. A few weeks less than that since we set his body free in a West Virginia river. It’s hard to put in words how time has felt, but I know we’ve all felt it this year. This is a story about an experience with death, and I know there is a lot of it in our midst these days, so if you’re feeling sensitive to it, maybe skip it. But with death comes rebirth, and with rain comes rainbows, so I feel it’s worth sharing.
The week before my father passed, I went on a plant medicine journey with a dear friend. As we watched the full moon rise, I shared with her how near I felt death was. Though I have an understanding and acceptance of death, I was feeling existential dread and fear. The truth is, I knew it was coming a few weeks before when the nursing home called to say they were doing “precautionary testing.” As a traumatic brain injury patient, he had suffered long enough. My friend shared her own experience with this fear and the divine message that “it” is all “us.” We are everything, and that is what we return to. It’s all love, and we have a choice to remember this in every waking moment.
Fast forward a few weeks and I’m on a solo road trip to WV to pick up my dad’s ashes. That trip was one of the most powerful of my life. I witnessed an acquaintance’s life change in a motorcycle accident in Georgia while on the back of a motorcycle myself. I made really good love, and fell in really good love. I laid in hammocks and pondered existence, connected with someone in real life that I had only met through yoga on Instagram. I celebrated the power of friendship in North Carolina, rode to breakfast in a wooden boat and laughed until I couldn’t breathe, dug up Sassafras with my dad’s sister in Tennessee, miscalculated a hike and was given the grace of meeting a fellow Bonnaroo-goer to walk me back in the dark. I almost drove off the side of a West Virginia mountain in a lightening storm, reconnected with my brother after not seeing him in 8 years or so, and I said goodbye to the man whose life brought me into the world.
I stayed at my brother Toby’s for just one night so we could connect in celebration and mourning. It stormed crazy the whole night through. I hardly slept. In the morning when the sun came out I meditated by the river with his cat in my lap. We walked around and drank coffee and Toby dug up some wild ramps for me to take home to my mom. He gave me a drum he hand carved out of a tree trunk. He and my dad both love to give their things away. It’s my favorite quality about them.
I planned on getting on the road to head to North Carolina that day so after enjoying the morning we took the time to honor our dad. Toby packed a bowl (that only he smoked before the ceremony— he and my dad followed the Grateful Dead together, it was how he knew my dad would want it, and he certainly wasn’t wrong), gathered the box of ashes, a fresh bundle of cedar to smudge, and my wind chime for sound healing.
We walked to the river and sat to pray. We prayed in deep gratitude and hope, and blessed his journey. We prayed that we would both embody all of our dad’s best qualities for the rest of our days, for the benefit of life, people, and the earth. Our dad was a coal miner, a bee keeper, and an avid gardener; a man with Native American heritage who lived his life with his hands in the dirt and his heart connected to others. There wasn’t an Appalachian plant out there he couldn’t tell you about, and there’s wasn’t a human on this earth he wouldn’t give the shirt off his back to.
I smudged the wooden box containing the ashes. When I unscrewed the box to pull out the bag of ashes, I noticed a metal medallion on the clamp. It said nothing on it but “1972,” the year my brother was born. I handed it to him to show him. You can see the picture in this thread of him in the moment he saw it and cried. He took the medallion off the bag and held it.
I held the bag of ashes and smudged them again, praying, giving thanks, feeling, remembering. It’s the strangest thing, being so distant all my life from the person who gave me life. There wasn’t a moment in my childhood that I didn’t long for him, until I learned to dissociate. So as I instinctively dug my right hand into those ashes, it was an indescribable feeling to feel closer to him in that moment than I ever had; to be able to hold and love the body that carried him through life.
As I sifted him through my fingers I became so fascinated with the particles of bone left. I sat and studied the patterns in them, the crevices and shapes and curves, the burnt yellow layers on stark white that I imagined were from ligaments, fat, or connective tissue. I thought of the parts of his body that were already missing and discarded years ago from when he got shot and lost his arm. I thought of his spine, and how in our final conversation he said it was “as crooked as a politician.”
This was his whole. Porous pieces of earth that very much still carried his energy.
I took a few of the bones I was particularly fond of, put them in a little cap my brother had, and set them on a rock. It started to rain ever so slightly, pressing us forward. I’ll go first. I walked into the water with both hands full of ashes and as I let them fall I cried, “You’re free now, dad.” In my sobbing those words became pleading as I gazed into the sky, “Dear God I hope he’s free. I hope you’re free, I hope you’re free.”
Small drops of rain fell on the ashes still remaining on my hands, leaving flesh-colored craters in my palms. I rubbed my hands together, almost as if to slowly wash and exfoliate them, and was floored at the sensation. When water mixed with them it became the most silky, slippery substance, like the softest lubricant you can imagine. Like a layer of serum, or silicone even. I dipped my hands in the river only to find that rinsing them increased that slippery sensation, and my God, did I marvel and revel in that moment. I let my father’s body nourish me, soften me, and absorb through my own porous hands, receiving his energy to mix with mine. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Parts of him fell into puddles on rocks, I continued to marvel, all parts of me wide open.
My brother took his turn. He didn’t say much, he only wept and said “love you dad.” It started to rain a little harder, so we packed everything up and headed back to the house.
Upon getting to the house I realized I had left the cap full of bones sitting on the rock. It was raining significantly harder by then, but I didn’t want to wait, so I ran back down and jumped down the river bank to get them. I stood under a tree for a moment, looking at the ashes from our ceremony in the puddles get more and more diluted. Something propelled me to take off my boots and stand in the down stream, maybe to be with his body as it continued to flow along its journey. As soon as I stepped my feet into that water, the sky opened up and started to really pour. There I stood, bones in hand, getting drenched. It was one of those moments where I just wanted to feel it all, so I put my face up toward the sky and I sang Amazing Grace as praise, just as I had sung it to my father through FaceTime in his last days. I’ll never forget the warmth of my tears amidst the cold of the rain on my skin. It was one of the most profound moments of my life.
I slowly walked back to the house after that, dripping rain all over the porch when I got there, stripped down to my underwear and toweled off. I wanted to remember that feeling forever. Hollow but full, awestruck and raw. I grabbed my phone and took a photo of my face, the expression in my eyes. To my surprise, but no surprise at all, the time stamp on it was 3:06, the time I was born.
There were symbols of both my brother’s birth and mine in that little ceremony we had, and I just don’t think it’s possible that those kinds of synchronicities are anything less than God, or at the very least, our father’s spirit cloaking us with love and reassurance. Now whenever I see my birth time, I am reminded of the spirit that lives in every moment of my life, and I encourage you to do the same.
As we walk into 2021, let’s remember with every chance we get, we are everything, in one. I know that each breath I take is a gift, an opportunity for rebirth, and that in dying, no matter if it’s a full transition, or an ego death in this lifetime, we are born anew and given an opportunity to shine more freely. My dad always called me Rainbow. He knew I was born to shine. “It was born in you,” he wrote in a letter once.
As I put dry clothes on, Toby popped a bottle of his homemade berry champagne, we shared a little toast, and I left shortly thereafter for North Carolina. The rain cleared and the clouds parted just as I crossed over the West Virginia border into Virginia. I looked back toward those mountains to give thanks for my life and my path one last time, and you know what I saw in the rear view?
You’re damn right, it was a rainbow.
