I was not myself when I arrived this time at the beginning of St. Cuthbert's Way in Melrose.
With me was a brand new group of walking writers, several of whom had been preparing for months to take on the challenge of walking between seven and 13 miles for seven consecutive days. The were eager to experience the Scottish borderlands, move across a path considered a pilgrimage, and to see what doing so would bring to their writing. If anything. What I didn't tell these fellow travelers is that sometimes what comes during a long walk is silence—in the head and on the page. Instead, what arises follows a writer home, simmers for a while and then makes it way to the fingers.
Usually on an adventure like this, I am the most eager one.
Undereager
It is an extraordinary thing to watch others meet the physical and emotional challenges of a long walk, whether they walk every step or make that distance in some other way.
By our Fitbits, iWatches, phones, and apps, those 7-mile days clocked in at 10ish and the 13-miler came in at 15. We moved up and across high moors, navigated sucking bogs and muddy farmland, and leaned into high-speed wind and at least one hour of prickling hail. At the same time, we prompted writing through artful play and the influence of nature (not to mention a good peaty Scotch here and there). For me, it is always a great and sometimes humbling honor for me to hear the words of writers willing to try something new.
But as we gathered together the night before we started our walk, I didn't feel my normal excitement. What I felt instead was weariness and worry. Could I facilitate a retreat that others would remember with joy and pride in spite of my sadness?
What came with me
Less than two weeks before this pilgrimage, my mother died. Mom had multiple, significant health issues for the last 10 years of her life. But, somehow, whether through great medicine or sheer grit, she always came roaring back. It's possible that some part of me believed her to be invincible. It turned out she was human.
And so, I headed to Scotland with a grief in my heart and a vial of her ashes around my neck.
Facilitators all
There is no way to express my gratitude to the the six writers who joined me on this path. While I was the stated "facilitator" of the retreat, they are the ones who did the facilitating. Through their kindness, their patience with each other and with me when my energy levels wained, their beautiful and often vulnerable writing, and their deep listening, I felt the edges of healing start to form in my heart. I brought the hard work of mourning to Scotland and they helped me rephrase that work as a joyous, if painful, adventure.
If you've followed my walks along other pilgrimage routes on this blog, you may remember that I start many of them with a reminder of what a pilgrimage is: a journey, especially a long one, made to some sacred place.
Vessel
While pilgrimage routes are most often associated with a specific religion, for the purposes of this writing retreat, the sacred place of arrival might be Holy Island at the end of our walk or it might be an inner place.
A journey requires a vessel—the means by which the pilgrim moves from one place to the other. It could be a boat, a car, a body. Using clay, I invited writers to close their eyes and really feel the clay in their hand while they consider the idea of a vessel, then to spend time molding a vessel. When it was time to write, vessel became our prompt.
Safety
Looking at the vessels formed—wide-open hand holding a tiny valentine of a heart, an anatomically closer version of a human heart, a womb—and the people who would be traveling in them in the days to come, I felt a sense of familiarity. I was safe in my grief.
Despite feeling like a cup half full who barely made her flight, I knew I was in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. If my clay vessel, a cremation box, was too heavy to carry me to the end of this journey, I knew their vessels would help me to arrive at that sacred place.
WRITING FROM THE DAY
Vessel
By Dorothy P. Marshall
Can you understand
that within your hand of clay
you hold a treasure
more luminous than a pearl
and far brighter than a diamond?
It's not yours to keep
but, rather, to give away—
for, in the giving,
a greater joy awakens
and your soul opens to love.
Heart Vessels
By Ann Bergman
Hearts are having trouble all around me these days. Not broken by love ending but by vessels struggling to keep life going.
A friend was walking her mom across the Costco parking lot—there to buy toilet paper and other life necessities—and only about five steps from the car, her mom's feet won't lift off the pavement. Her ticker is giving all it has got, but even this ER nurse and horse trainer can't will it to do more.
And the dad down our block who drives past every morning puffing on the cigarettes his wife forbids him to smoke because they are unhealthy went past our house a week ago at night on the way to the hospital because he was having a heart attack.
My own heart clutched tight like a fist was squeezing the air out of it when my daughter sobbed on the phone telling me about her daughter getting pulled from the bottom of the pool at the Hyatt on Maui, lying still with blue lips and eyes open but not seeing and a stranger slipping out of the crowd of bystanders—"I know CPR, is it ok if I give it to her?"
"Yes."
My daughter was calling from the hospital room with my granddaughter back with us.
The Cremation
By Cheryl Murfin
TThe box was at least 7 feet long.
My mother would have loved this sudden increase in stature. As it was, she was 4'8" in heels, and her body had slid down from the head of the cardboard casket, away from the pillow that the funeral director, I'll call her C, had laid beneath her head after enshrouding her in white, and laying her on a thick pad of ice. Looking over my mother, my eyes met C's. They were kind and caring and far to young for that job.
The shroud was shimmery—an inexpensive sateen—but silken to the touch, and for reasons I can't articulate, I was glad about that. My mother liked soft things. I think she would have liked this cacoon of white.
C lifted the nearly weightless lid off the box as if she were opening a saint's coffin—with the slowness of ceremony, sacredness, and reverence.
"She looks good," she'd assured us before we entered the cremation chamber. "Peaceful. You'll see."
In the box, there was simply a body at rest, eyes slightly open but empty of my mother. If I remember only one part of my mother, it will be her hazel eyes, how they sparkled or clouded, depending.
I closed her eyes the night she died. Now, I ran my finger over them once more. "Nothing to see here…"
I combed my fingers through her hair, which felt almost warm despite spraying from an ice-cold scalp. I kissed her on the forehead, like a baby, like I kissed my babies; like she kissed me when I was her baby, like the baby she was in the before I never knew, when her own mother kissed her.
I had written my mother a letter the night before the cremation. Let us forgive each other, I wrote, and ourselves. For the countless weaknesses of our human condition. For the opportunities to love and be present to the other that we missed. I asked her to take our triumphs with her and promised to do the same—the times when we each shined for the other. The times we were our best selves, without fear or ego or disease or shame. Guilt, regret—there is nothing in them for either of us now. I release them, I wrote. I placed the letter above her heart. I wanted my words to melt into her bones and be reminders in the ashes.
I wondered where my brother's mind took him as he said his final goodbye and pushed the button to the chamber door. The rollers rolled the box forward. It reminded me of a pizza on a peel pushed onto the baking stone. I thought, what a delightful, nourishing, celebratory thing to rise in the fire. Perhaps God is a fire.
But my brother and I will never know each other's heart experience. And would there ever be adequate words?
The swiftness of her conveyance surprised me. I yearned to push a button to reverse the rollers and stop her body from disappearing forever. But the cardboard box was a wooden boat sailing my mother to that other shore. There was no reverse. Mountain to river to sea, a lifespan, a minute. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.
What did I feel then? What did I know on that morning?
Words float to the surface: Permanence. Impermanence. We are always complete, though never finished. Full circle—an end and a beginning reconnected.
And another word: Gone. Because my mother did not sit up in her humble box, as some small part of me hoped she would. She did not say, with her chipped indignance, "Wait. I am still here."
Instead, she slid forward on the rollers, letting that ocean of heat take her. And I marveled at the finality of that action.
I witnessed my mother's last breath. I had watched it rise and fall away into an inconceivable silence and then held my breath, waiting for the next breath that did not come. My brother and I had sat by that bed and listened hard for her crossing through over. It didn't make a sound.
But here was her body. The same body that carried us inside and which we held onto as our mother climbed her final mountain.
And here was the valley that we could not carry her through or enter with her.
I looked to where my aunt stood at the side of the cremation chamber and witnessed the deep well of loss there—a sister of nearly 70 years, a best friend.
Should we have rendt out garments then? Was this the time, finally, for the wailing? I waited as the steel door come down. Ready to rend and wail.
Instead, it was quiet but for the hum of the furnace. I peered into the tiny window of the heavy door. I stared into this holy chamber and watched the heat as it opened the box's foot.
What I felt was the opposite of wailing. It was a giving. A sending. An end to the sufferings of this one small and broken body.
What I saw inside that white-hot chamber was a receiving.
The cremation attendant pulled me away from the glass portal. "Safety," he whispered.
And so I moved away from the door and hugged my aunt and my brother and fell into the embrace of that other presence: pure and blessed grief.
On the drive home, a voice and memory came to me. Many years ago, I sat in a Quaker meeting surrounded in silence by a group of people who do not speak until they have something to say—something formed by spirit. The silence lasted for nearly the entire hour. But at the very end, a woman stood up.
"When you feel like you're falling," she said. "Fall."
And with that, she sat down.
The day we cremated my mother, I finally knew what she meant.
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