The smoke from the fire. The salt from the sea.

The smoke from the fire. The salt from the sea.

“I come a fallen man to you, uplifter of all. I come undone by disease to you, the perfect physician. I come, my heart dry with thirst, to you, ocean of sweet wine. Do with me whatever you will”. - Jagannatha, 17c - from the poem Ganga Lahiri

The bonfire licked at the stars with orange and yellow tongues, heating the stones around the pit until they glowed and cracked. Ten feet tall with the brightness of daylight, the heat crashed against the wall of cold like an elemental sumo wrestler. It was new year's eve and the temperature fluctuated somewhere between “warlock parka” and “witches teet”, depending on your proximity to the flame. It was one of those California winter chills that cause people from the East Coast to bore you to tears with stories of “real cold “ or how “37 degrees is t-shirt weather”. It seemed real enough to me as we huddled on top of a mountain in Big Sur, waiting for midnight.

The fire provided most of the light, but when I turned to the ocean, the moon and the stars made their stand. The moon wasn't quite a Cheshire Cat smile, more of a smirk, hung at eye level like a cardboard stage prop. A celestial toe-nail clipping that cast a disproportionate beam of light over the calm, glassy ocean. Like a spotlight guiding the way; a landing strip across the rippled mirror of the sea. The lack of light pollution, out there at the edge of the world, allowed the stars to shine like their own little moons. Venus twinkled above the others, winking her eye down at us suggestively as we shivered on the mountainside. We had made it down from the bay area in time for sunset, after pulling over for the queasy kid to get some fresh air on the windy snake of Highway 1. I was the same at her age, a seven year old hanging out of the side of the car, painting the door with whatever bland vegetarian cuisine my parents tried to pass off as lunch. She made it all the way to the base of the dirt road that switched back and forth up the mountain before she yacked. Another five minutes and she would have been on steady ground at the top. We were there to remember my Uncle Billy. He was a gentle man who gave of himself in life with a smile that went beyond the one always stretched across his face. It was a warmth of heart and a wisdom that was deep and generous. He was there for my brother and I more than we ever were for him. He taught us something about being men, by just being a good man himself.

He had passed away a couple weeks before new year's in Mexico. He was surfing five days before his death. There was pain, but not for long, at least for that we could give thanks. That night we shared stories of love about the man and what he meant to us. It was a wake, a circle of remembrance, a hippie funeral. As we passed a bottle of wine and a couple Cheech & Chong joints around the fire, I turned to look down the mountain at the moonlight and the sea, and thought of my own father who died long ago, somewhere far away.

He passed away in India from dysentery. Of course there is more to the story, more I still don't know, or am still afraid to know. We heard that he was cremated there, his ashes spread on the Ganges. But we never had a funeral, we never got to put him to rest. Soldiers obliterated by bombs or trapped in steel graves under the sea got a marker somewhere and a twenty-one gun salute. Our dad got none of that, an American dead on foreign shores, a stranger in a strange land. He died out there in a haze of vague details, his body spread over that sacred river. I could visit him there, but how many tons of ash have been spread on that same stretch of water, how many millions of corpses have been poured out over his? My father's body mingled with the polluted waters, with the filth and tears of other funerals, the dusty remains of other fathers. Would he wait in a stinking river for thirty years for me to come? Considering his wanderlust, his thirst for travel and adventure. Still, I feel the draw to go, maybe because it's the closest thing to a grave he has.

Vishnu took three large strides across the earth, the sky and into heaven. On the last step he punched a hole in the vault of heaven, letting out the flow of Vishnupadi to splash down on the Polestar and flow across the sky creating the milky way. When it finally landed, it was on our moon. There it pooled until it spilled over and poured down over the lotus flower sitting on top the world, its pedals making up the continents. The sacred waters traveled down one petal into India, through Bangladesh, out to the sea and down to the netherworld. This was how the Ganges was born, the link between heaven and earth and hell. Did my father fallow one of those paths up or down, or did he mingle with the wet ashes of all the other fathers that didn't say goodbye? Maybe he swam with those dead fathers and mothers and children and poets and lovers and lawyers and bums. Maybe he turned to mud again with them in that river, in the Ganges. A ball of clay to be molded again.

Or perhaps they all linked arms and sang and danced and swam down the river, all the way to the the ocean. There my dad talked his way past the gates of the underworld and caught a current as it rolled by, like a spiritual hitchhiker. Around the Cape of Good Hope, up through the Atlantic to swirl in the Caribbean and be spit back out again. Then south around Cape Horn and back up past the Chillian Andes and the Easter Island monoliths to the California coast. To lay under that fragile beam of moonlight all these years later. Was my dad in those waves? Was Billy with him? In the astral plains above. Had he finally made his journey there to see me, to say goodbye?

I didn't hear him, but I think I felt him there that night, as I felt Billy up in the aether negotiating his karmic bar tab. I'd like to think he was helping my dad pay off his, so they could both move on, be free. Lift the weight of the words unsaid or the ache to see them again. But I know I will never be free of that desire. I will always wish they were here with me and I am thankful for that pain, I hold onto it because it's all I have left of them and it's mine. It is a wound I can touch and cause the ache and remember those who have gone. How does one become free from grief without loosing the perspective on what life really means. I think that a final resting place is just an illusion, and closure is a myth. I will miss these men, until the day I join them, wherever they are. The afterlife, the aether, oblivion, who knows? Until then I have built a crypt for them inside of me. My rib-cage, a vaulted room for them to live. To store the lessons they gave me in life and the lessons they continue to teach me in death. My chest, full of warm blood. My lungs full of cold air on that night. The smoke from the fire. The salt from the sea. I will visit their graves with each moment I am blessed to spend with their wives and children and grandchildren. I will close my eyes and breathe them in with the smell of my daughter's hair as she sits on my lap. I will visit them often, as they visit me through these gifts. These beautiful children.

I will invite them in.

I will swallow them whole.

I will do what I can to live well. For them.