Earth’s Affection: Part II
Allowing final goodbyes
Well, you’ve probably guessed what we did. My hints weren’t very sublte.
“We tend to think of death as a return to clay, a victory for nature. But maybe it is the converse: that when you die, your native place will fill with sorrow. It will miss your voice, your breath and the bright waves of your thought, how you walked through the light and brought news of other places. When the funeral cortège [or three son‘s carrying your urned remains] passes the home of the departed person, is it the home that is getting one last chance to say farewell to its beloved resident or is it the deceased getting one last look at the home? Or is it both?”
~ John O’Donohue. “Beauty: The Invisible Embrace” (Harper: Perennial. 2004)
On Tuesday, Char, the wonderful and thoughtful director of A Sacred Moment, called to say Dad’s cremated remains were ready to be returned to family. So, I brought Dad back home again.
No, that’s not right. Remember, language is important to me, and how we USE language is perhaps even more important. But the greatest importance of all is likely how language is used to describe rare moments of the sacred and profound, the soulful moments of our lives. So, let me say that again with a more appropriate choice of words:
I was blessed to be able to bring back to my home for a spell, the remains of Dad’s body that have been turned BACK into the dust from which he came—the literal earth element of the four ancient and basic elements (the other three: air, water, and fire, all now transfigured into the earth element in order to renew the cycle for new life). The dust that we soon will return to its place of rightful origin—the landscape and soil of Dad’s birth.
I didn’t “bring Dad” home. He’d already returned, through his Soul’s return to the Anima Mundi (the Soul of the World), to the places and times of the boundless, eternal silence which is all around us. And within us.
Remember: When asked where Dad is, we’ll point to our hearts. You’re invited to do the same.
There, that’s better.
On Wednesday, after meeting with Msgr. Ecker, the celebrant for Dad’s upcoming funeral, Clary, Trevor, and I, with some memorabilia of Dad, AND the beautiful “earthen” vessel containing his dust, went on a tour!
So much can be said and written from the perspective of each of these places. Through this blog, so much has already been written as memory—from growing up on the various farms he farmed, from gaining sustenance from the blessings and offerings from each place through the foods we ate, the waters we drank and used for irrigation, the lessons of Elderings we learned, and the values and skills we continue to bring forth into our worlds—all due to Dad’s presence in each of the landscapes we visited.
A whole book or books could be written in fact.
Suffice it to say for now, the memories conjured from that tour were powerful…and joyful. We were remembering such times of happiness with Dad, and secondarily mom, our touchstones in each place. We were struck by the power and vibrance of those memories, many as if they were created yesterday rather than over 5 decades ago. And we were struck by the landscapes themselves and how they appeared to be “frozen in time.” So many landmarks, manmade and natural, were still there—each landmark surfacing its own rich and vibrant story of remembrance: the skeletal outlines of the gyms of both Wapato and Toppenish HS’s (Clary’s old haunts of basketball heroics); Allen Market at the Wapato turnoff; St. Aloysius Catholic Church and the Harvey’s old house just a minute’s walk away (and still with the hedge out front!); Pitt and Pitt air strip (where the area’s cropdusters would land, house, and refill their planes to spray the regions crops from the air. Side note: in addition to me BEING Evel Kneivel, and Neal Armstrong, and Aquaman as I grew up, I was also a crop duster wannabe. I still am, btw.).
More: Fort road was still Fort road (the road Clary bragged about reaching 110 mph in his car but NEVER anywhere near the house and the sight of mom’s eyes—I actually didn’t know cars back then went that fast! Sorry bro!). McKinley Elementary, where each of us attended primary school, has been transformed into the beautiful campus of Heritage College. The Toppenish homestead was still there but it has gotten really small in these intervening years (how does THAT happen?). And that expansive front lawn, the one Dad used to flood with irrigation water (from the standpipe we could still see was present under the lawn at the lawn’s edge), the one we played football on, even while flooded!, the one we hunted for and found Easter eggs within, the one mom grew her prized roses (which were still there!), how was it possible THAT lawn that once looked like it used to need a four iron to span now was nothing short of the softest of sand wedges? The “cement pond,” or pool was still situated in its exact same place—the one we swam in filled with irrigation water that had to be at most 38 degrees; the same one Dad would use to soak bales of hop twine during twining season.
On our tour of remembrance and reconnection, we visited both grandma’s homes; the first home in Union Gap our parents lived into after marriage; the small home three homes down from Moxee elementary; the home in Toppenish, and the three homes in Moxee after we moved away from the Toppenish homestead (the one place among them all that likely provided the most vivid and fondest of memories and our earliest of Dad as farmer). We toured past Clifford and Bernie’s home; Pat’s home; and the final home Dad lived in all on his own, the first and only home he inhabited “independently” that did not have mom’s presence from her prior physical presence. We drove by “jail,” OOPS, we drove by Brookdale Assisted Living facility. And then I drove back home to Club Mediterranean Lake Stevens campus at the end of the day.
In all, on that day, we were able to visit, with Dad’s presence very much a part within us, and the ghosts of who he was very much a presence in each space, through the stories we shared with each other, a total of 12 places. We visited more that also still held mom’s presence, and we drove past other haunts and places important to our parents, but this was a tour of Dad and the places HE lived in so that both he, and those places he loved, could be reunited for just a few more precious, and all too short, moments. We stayed for minutes in each place—I think all three of us could have stayed for hours. The stories still so vibrant, and enthralling, and joyful.
And just as you’d guess, we also felt the wistful melancholy of those times gone by, because they also brought to surface the passages of our own lives—right alongside our remembrances of Dad’s. We remembered, WE belong to those places too, and they belong to us. We can only hope they will hold memory of us in the same manner they are still fondly remembering our Dad.
Quite literally, Dad’s own DNA is still there, in each place he inhabited. This fact was very apparent to me as we toured the landscapes of his past. It was apparent in the strength of memory that surfaced so effortlessly as we drove, and stopped, and took pictures, and talked. And remembered. It was almost as if the ghosts of the past stopped whatever it was they happened to be doing at the time, turned in recognition to us and said:
“You are Wally’s boys. We remember you! Welcome back—we have missed you, some. We have missed your Dad more. Your Dad is now with us as well, though you cannot see him. We remembered him too, and with great fondness because he loved us and treated us well though he could have burned a few less weeds. We reciprocated that care back to him through the abundances of the harvests from our clay. Know that he is home now, so rest your hearts even as you carry him too. We have never forgotten your Dad.”
But also as I wrote in Part I, the places we’ve been will only return a remembrance and fondness to us, and even grieve our “awayness,” to a degree that is only commensurate with the degree and quality of the love we offered to IT when we were a presence there. Why would the landscapes of our youth care at all about us if we didn’t take care of them, or trashed, polluted, or poisoned them (the burning of weeds notwithstanding!); if we didn’t offer blessings when we harvested and only took instead of returned? And even when we walked by litter that was on its hallowed ground and didn’t pick it up—let alone, heaven forbid, WE be the one responsible for the litter in the first place. We should be grateful the land is all-forgiving and does not hold grudges. The lands and landscapes and clay and soil of Dad’s life were served well by their acquaintance with our Dad. It’s always our choice to return to the land we inhabit the love it obviously has for us.
And I do believe they, those haunting landscapes, not only welcomed seeing him again, but they, too, have now let him go only to welcome him anew, like us, in the new ways of Soul.
“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“Where there is holy ground, there shall be sorrow, and joy, and poignant remembrance—the whole of a life and landscape.” ~ Kert Lenseigne
Always with love,
🙏🏼
Kert
Postscript: The most striking moment of our tour with Dad’s presence occurred for each of us at the exact same moment when Trevor noticed something completely unexpected. We were about to pull away from the old Toppenish homestead when we pulled off the side of the road at the end of the hop field adjacent to the home to take one last look and picture from that viewpoint. That was when Trevor noticed this:
The farm corporation who most recently purchased this hop field, that still contains the DNA of our long ago young father, unbeknownst to us, and certainly to Dad, chose THIS name to name it. It was the proverbial “goosebumps” moment for each of us.
They named the field “Wally’s” field.
“Wally’s.”
And Dad never knew. Until, that is, we showed him with our own eyes, with his dust and presence along with us, on a cool and slightly overcast late March day during hop twining season while his three boys were on a tour of remembrance on his behalf.
Now we know without a single doubt, the land remembers.
Wally’s sign kind of sum’s it up. He may not be there physically to work the field but I’m sure he will be supervising. Great memories.
That was beautiful! A great description of a memorable day, a day I will remember forever!
Love and miss you Dad!