Today marks two years since my siblings and I met in California to climb, together, our mother's favorite mountain and scatter her ashes.  Mom passed away in July of 2012 and, 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.
     Now that over three years after passed since Mom's been gone, I find myself slightly less overwhelmed by the enormity of the loss of her presence, marginally less struck by the devastating existential ambiguity of life without any parents at all.  But the loss persists.  And it always will.  My parents had always seemed larger than life, people whose lives had pervaded ours with more than we could usually grasp, a founts of love and care that never failed to move and brighten and enlighten us.  They were wonderful beyond words.
     Happily, however, I can never forget who my parents have been in my life.  Even though, particularly in the case of my father, many, many years have passed since they left me, I cannot forget them.  Our memories are remarkable and wonderful things.
     So, to use a vastly overlook cliché, life goes on.  But it seems that it is not so much life that goes on but rather our perception of it, that we, living out our days on this fading planet, find ourselves grasping an experience which, in the end, endures even if we do not.  We live, but we do not.
     And that's the beauty, as well as the tragedy of it:  we live in something we did not make but which we enjoy and appreciate greatly, live with something we strive daily to take hold of and understand, something that one day we will no longer have.  But we live anyway, for what else is there to do?
     Just this:  whatever and wherever our--and by this I mean everyone on this earth--parents may be today, we know that in them we see (or have seen) that life can only be life if it means more than itself, that what makes life, life, is precisely that, life, unmade, ever and always there.  Otherwise, why are we even here?