Memory, sweet memory.  Many a poet has uttered these words, and many a writer has woven them into her narrative.  Throughout the ages, people have treasured memory, the remembrances of the joy and wonder that have spoken into their life experience.
     Memory was on my mind as I visited the site of my cousin Elizabeth's ashes last week. As some readers may know, Elizabeth passed away in December at the age of 61.  Several months before I left for the West, Liz's husband wrote me to share where he and his family had scattered her ashes.  It was, he said, in a meadow in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, and he gave me directions to find it.  After a time of hiking around the range, I made my way to the trail he had named, trekked the requisite distance, and came upon it.  Spreading out below a massive peak, its many flowers mixing with spruce and cedar trees, green grasses swaying gently in the alpine breeze, the meadow shimmered quietly in the fading sun.  Breathing in the silence, I thought:  what a lovely place to spend eternity.  Although Elizabeth's soul is elsewhere, permanently unified with her creator, the Lord God of the universe, her ashes will remain on the planet she loved, safely ensconced in the depths of the mountains in which she and her husband had spent countless wonderful times in their thirty-five years together.
     Thanks, Elizabeth, I said, thanks for the life we shared, thanks for the memories you left me, thanks for being in my days.  I'll miss you always.
     How beautiful that we, we frail human beings, can remember.  How marvelous that we can look back, how remarkable that we can reflect.  How amazing that we live in this astonishing and tragic world, a world of gain, a world of loss, a world in which past, present, and future are ever flowing together, a world that is constantly blessing us with the riches of this unbearably profound existence.  Such startling poignancy, such bright pain.
     Memory, sweet memory.  And God.