Ghost Ranch and Death

Among the many things you learn on the Georgia O'Keeffe Landscape Tour at Ghost Ranch is that O'Keeffe's ashes are scattered upon the top of Pedernal - that magnificent mountain that occupies the western horizon. And so, in addition to painting Pedernal so famously and so often, she is also a part of it, in a certain way.

My grandmother's ashes are scattered at the Grand Canyon - a place she loved. I don't know whether she got the idea from O'Keeffe, but it is quite reasonable to assume my grandmother knew the fact about O'Keeffe, at least.

Being made up to look alive and lowered into the ground in a plush, overpriced box makes no sense to me. I had long wished to be cremated when I die - mostly because, I think, it seems simple and pure - a sort of graceful return to the earth - full circle, all that. But recently, I find myself feeling that even this is unnecessary. What does it matter what happens to my body when I am no longer alive within it?

Perhaps mine is a stoic impulse. For a long time, when I would pass an animal dead in the road, I would feel terribly bad not just for the suffering I didn't want it to have felt, but for the humiliating and exposed location in which it died.

Well, I know no remedy for the way the suffering makes me feel. But I no longer feel bad for the location of the animal. I can see now that where and how it died cannot subtract from the grace, and joy, and miracle that was its life. It hurts me no longer that an animal might be laying in the road, but for all the other places it might have met its end. If I say anything to myself, it is that I hope it experienced what happiness its nature afforded it during its life. In such a moment, I might more likely feel pride as feel despair - the idea of celebrating, rather than mourning, life at its end is not some "life hack", but a natural reaction for anyone with a stoic mindset.

And now, I have found that I feel the same for myself. No thought of how I might die - no matter how my body might break, or what dehumanized end I could some day endure - can subtract from the grace of my life. Place me gently in the ground with a ceremony, or throw my lifeless body in a ditch to later be scavenged, it does not matter to me - only what I have done during my life will ever matter.

And so it is, that I have come to feel that it does not matter to me where I am buried, or how my body is otherwise disposed of. I believe that it will matter more to my surviving family and friends. That is not to say, necessarily, that they should be left to decide - I don't think it's right to put such a decision on others - but I think that, in time, I will decide in a way that is compassionate to them and that I believe will give the event whatever meaning it can have, to help them make sense and go on living their own lives to the fullest.