I stare out the window of our cottage in southern Wisconsin thinking about how fast this year has gone by. Golden maples and russet oaks are shedding their leaves again as 1992 approaches its end. Thinking about how quickly time passes reminds me that it has been a year since my parents died within months of each other.
Sometimes I can hardly believe that they`re gone. At other times I see their passing as part of the natural order of things. They led a full and happy life until they were well into their 70s.
A biblical verse was used in a 1960s song, ”Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the pop group The Byrds, ”For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die . . . .”
Reflections on the coming of autumn bring me back to a year ago July when my family and I drove nearly 2,000 miles from Chicago to Sun City West, Ariz. My father had died there that April. My mother died in June, having left Sun City West at the end of May to visit her brother in Gulf Breeze, Fla. I was with both parents when they died. I dreaded going back to their condominium without them there to greet us. But as we opened the door and walked through, I felt surprisingly calm.
The next morning we started to go through drawers, cabinets and closets. We had to dispose of most of their possessions and put their condo up for sale. I switched the kitchen radio on. My mother had kept the dial at a station that played music of the 1940s and `50s, which she and my dad had loved.
I listened to the romantic lyric of ”Where or When,” and then the melody of a song about pyramids along the Nile that I hadn`t heard since I was a child. By the second verse, I was concentrating on the lyrics:
”See the marketplace in old Algiers.
Send me photographs and souvenirs.
Just remember when a dream appears,
You belong to me. I`ll be so alone without you . . . .”
My parents were together for 50 years. It was hard to think of one without the other.
For the next week we sorted and sifted through their household. Seeing and touching familiar things helped me reconcile myself to the loss of my parents. I came to terms with the treasures of my past and of the present: a life to develop and cherish with my own family.
The five or six days we planned to stay turned into seven. We worked long, hard hours distributing my parents` possessions, cleaning and settling the affairs of their estate. By the morning of the eighth day, we were ready to leave. It also was my birthday. My husband asked me whether I wanted to stay another day, but I felt ready to go. We had one more task to accomplish some distance away, on the way home.
As he had wished, my father had been cremated. His ashes were put to rest in a beautiful desert region of Arizona. My mother also had been cremated. We drove that day to the area where we were told my father`s ashes had been placed. My husband, a United Methodist minister, then placed my mother`s ashes in the sandy soil.
Arizona`s searing summer sun shone down on us as my husband said a prayer. I silently said goodbye to the woman who had given birth to me on this date so many years ago. Beginnings and endings and symbols and rituals marked the day.
I admire the already-changing colors outside our cottage window as my thoughts return to the present. The great Earth-at least that part of it within my vision-soon will slumber as winter comes to the Midwest. But before we know it, spring will be here again, launching a new cycle of life in nature, providing us with hope of new and wonderful things. It will be a time to renew the spirit-”a time to plant.”
