About one year ago today, I traveled to California to meet my three siblings so that we could scatter the ashes of our mother on her favorite mountain.  Mom passed away in July of 2012.  After another year, we managed to sell her house and dispose of her remaining possessions.  All that remained was to scatter her ashes, which one of my sisters had been keeping since we got them from the mortuary.
     As anyone who has lost a parent knows, such a task is bittersweet at best.  Though we all missed Mom terribly (our dad had died many years before), we knew that she would want us to scatter her ashes on the top of Mt. Baden Powell, a 9,400 foot peak with which she had grown up.  It had been one of her favorite places, one to which she, while she was able, returned time and time again.
     As had we.  Now, however, the four of us were on the mountain alone, no Mom, no Dad, just us and our thoughts and memories about them.  They were gone.  It was a heartbreaking thought, really, to realize that the ones whose presence had graced our life the longest, the ones who, in the course of our  lives, had loved us most fully and dearly, were now irretrievably and forever gone.  It was a poignant commentary on the fleetinglessness of existence.
     Once we were on top, we opened the box.  The bag seemed so small, much too little to house one who had been one of the biggest parts of our lives.  Mom had always seemed larger than life, a person whose life had pervaded ours with more than we could usually grasp, a fount of love and care that never failed to move and brighten and enlighten us.  She was wonderful beyond words.
     A few days after I got home, I penned the following thoughts, which I sent to my siblings:

     "As I threw the last of my share of Mom’s ashes into the breeze slipping across the slopes of Baden Powell, I spied a crow, its black wings catching the wind, soaring effortlessly on the currents, hovering about the vastness of the valley below, the enormous expanse of sky arcing overhead.  I smiled.  Mom may be gone, but her spirit remains, soaring over the mountain she loved, the sky under which she had such joy, dancing about the memories she bequeathed, the memories we will take through to the last of our days. It was as if the final lines of Tolstoy’s Resurrection that, “Everything had been endowed with an entirely different meaning,” had come to life before me.  Even in the angst of the moment, everything before us, past, present, future, suddenly became a doorway, "showing" us, as Tolstoy put it, the way forward and home.
     "So it was as I read, on the airplane, in Mom’s book which Kath [one of my sisters] so kindly brought to me before we started our hike, some lines of the I Ching that Mom had highlighted in the initial chapter about Lao-Tse, “To merge silently, freed, into the stream of infinitude is the greatest good of life.”
     "Ah, yes, like the crow rising, coalescing with a blue eternity, so has what we left of Mom on the mountain risen as well, merging, ever so silently and without nary a whisper, with the earth from which she came, forever part of the infinitude which envelopes us all."

     So it is that I say today how thankful I am for my mother, and how doubly thankful I am to God for giving her to me.  She was the joy of a lifetime, a beautiful and enduring work of our creator, a God without end, a world without finish, the coming of eternity for us all, the Word made forever true.