The Crow

by Mary Golden

My entire immediate family is standing on the edge of a canyon located on my family's ranch. It's nearly sunset. My mother asks each of us to take a handful of my father's ashes and spread them on the edge. We do. She wants some of the ashes to blow over the cliff, and we all take a collective gasp as she steps right up to the edge of rocky ledge. The wind carries the remainder into the void and immediately a huge bird flys up out of the canyon. Some of us see a crow. Some of us see a hawk. My mom turns to us, amazed, hopeful "Do you think that was Dad's spirit?" How could it not be?

Later, I do some research on the spiritual meaning of crows and hawks:

* Transition of spirit to afterlife
* Crossing to spiritual world
* Unconditional love
* Spiritual aspect of death
* Spiritual strength

How could it not?

So I have just returned from the ranch. It has two weeks today since my father died. It's hard to be at work. There are larger things on my mind than board reports, special events, or meetings. But I can't shirk my responsibilities. Or my grief.

Where is there comfort, transcendence, acceptance?

Of course, it is in nature. The comfort of the crow or hawk. The comfort of laying lupine on his ashes. But now, I'm back in Central California. I will go to the hills. I will watch the pink/orange sunset on the swells at Montana de Oro, take comfort from the regular line of waves as they come ashore. I will smell the pines and eucalyptus, feel the dirt in my hand, and the solidity of stone.

My father was a rancher. Like most ranchers, he took pride in owning land. In his case, it was 16,000 acres. In this temporary ownership, there was somehow a sense of legacy, of permanence, of evidence that he passed this way once. But owners die, ranchers sell, and what was the Fezell place is now the Sharpe place, and will be someone else's place in the future. One of my best friends (who is also a rancher's daughter) and I have had many conversations about this, usually while walking up a canyon or sitting on the rocks by a creek. We talk of the this futility of trying to leave a permanent mark.

This is why public land is seductive. Not many of us have the luxury of being land owners, other than of our backyards. But State Parks belongs to us—across generations, time, race, gender, and political and spiritual beliefs. State Parks has a general policy not to let private memorial benches and plaques be placed in the parks. Because while State Parks can be a place of comfort in nature, they are not memorials to individuals; they are memorials for all of us. They are places of healing for all of us.

Mary Oliver's poem, "Wild Geese," says it best. But I cannot without permission reprint all of it, so just a line or two:

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
Are moving across landscapes

Despite our private grief, nature is there to comfort us, and say quietly, "I am here. I have always been, and always will be."

So, for my father, Jack Sharpe—a great man the world will never know who always put others before himself, who spent his life feeding the world, and who said, "I want no one between my God and me," who looked to nature to find God—a Lakota prayer:

When you were born, you cried, and the world rejoiced.
Now go. Honor our ways.
And when you are reborn undo the Great Spirit
You will rejoice, and the world will cry.

The stones, the water, the earth will capture my tears.