“Did you remember to get the cake?” I asked.
“Of course,” my wife answered, acting surprised that I would doubt their dependability on such a critical mission.
Lori, my daughter, Madi, and daughter-in-law, Kayla, had picked out a cake, Chocolate Orea, they knew he would like.
The next day we celebrated his birthday.
He would have been 30.
Of course, Harrison wasn’t there for his celebration.
Lori and I are part of a grief support group for parents of children who have died. We join in on zoom.com and gain strength, encouragement, and hope from one another. On one occasion, we talked about how important it is to keep the memories of our loved ones alive.
A couple mentioned how they had done something their child would have liked doing on the day of his birthday. After the meeting, Lori and I thought of Harrison’s love for sweets. Since we would be on a family vacation during what would have been Harrison’s birthday, we planned a little party. We were with our children and two grandchildren at Lake Norris for what I dubbed our “Covid-19 Vacation,” this past July.
So, on Harrison’s special day, we sang “Happy Birthday,” to him, and then each of us shared a funny memory about Harrison. And after that, we did something else he would have liked: played a silly card game.
I went to bed, gratified that we had not only kept Harrison’s memory alive but had comforted each other.
But the next day, I had the faint feeling that we had forgotten something.
“The ashes,” I whispered to Lori. “We forgot to spread his ashes like we did last year.”
The year before, on the occasion of Harrison’s first birthday after his death, we were on a cruise and had spread his ashes at sea.
“What about the lake?” I asked Lori, referring to the dock on Lake Norris.
She nodded, “Yes,” so we took a part of Harrison down to the boat dock. I called our family together, and we had a mini-ceremony, prayed, and dispersed some of the ashes into the lake.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection into eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen,” I closed.
Then reality hit me hard, quite unexpected.
Gazing at the ashes as they spread from a tight cluster into a shotgun-like dispersion in the bright, greenish-blue hues of the water, I saw Harrison’s life something like those ashes that disappeared so quickly. In one instance, they were so real and tangible, something we could touch and handle, and even try to control. And in the next moment, I could see life in a fast-forwarding like motion. Before our eyes, life as we know it dissipates into the earth, back into the source from which it came, as rapidly as the water engulfed those ashes, as quickly as the fog lifts in the morning.
But then, raising my gaze from the water to the sunlight streaming through the trees surrounding our little cove, I also knew something else about this life: it is more than we can see with our eyes, touch with our hands, and grasp with our arms.
Yes, it is here and gone, but it also endures forever. What’s real won’t die, and although we exert ourselves with feeble efforts to remember, latching on to rituals of one sort or another, we know it’s all we have, and even that slips through our fingers. It will never be enough, we know. Still, it will have to sustain us for now—until, oh, happy day, on that great gettin’ up morning, when the Lord splits the eastern sky—only then will we taste and see how good the Lord really is, and only then will we feel and know our loved ones in a way we could have only imagined. But now, this moment is all we have, and all we can do is wait and work and hope and watch.
We carry on with life as we know it, anticipating life as we don’t know it.
“Any more of that Chocolate Oreo cake?” I asked as Lori carried the urn with Harrison’s ashes back to the lake house.
“I think I’ll have some and remember, once more.”