the road goes ever...

Day 4

Yesterday we returned Rich to the earth.

A wet day, clouds hugging the almost-bare trees, a downpour as a friend pulls in the driveway. We're going to the funeral home to be with Rich before his last journey.

Rich is beautiful, wrapped in a muslin shroud, while in the background there's jazz playing.

I like hip funeral homes.

There's no sadness as we touch him, as he touches us. Death is the most meticulous destroyer of separation.

Lisa, the funeral director, and Jim, her assistant, lift Rich into the back of the van.

Jim, a retired school teacher, wants to tell me something. When he saw Rich's death certificate, he had shivers.

"I couldn't believe it," he says. "My father died of chordoma. He was 56 years old."

And all that could be done in those days, he says, was get a diagnosis, and then go home to die.

So, another member of the one-in-millions Chordomite family.

By the time we arrive at Greensprings the rain is light, and soon drops to a drizzle, and then a mist. But the friends keep pouring in, doubling the twenty or twenty-five estimate I gave to Lisa. It's noon in the middle of a workday, and I'm amazed and grateful.

We put Rich on the cart, jogging downhill through a muddy meadow that, when I bought our plots in May, was a wildflower field. Rich is lifted from the cart to the slats covering the grave, and then I say the best words I can.

We lower Rich into the earth. We cover him with pine boughs. I take three shovelfuls of mud and toss them down, and invite everyone to do the same. As I squat at Rich's head and watch this somber slip-slide dance -- no one falls -- there's a thick rectangular stone that calls to me. I get up, and find Jen, Greenspring's burial coordinator.

"That's the one," I tell her.

In a year, when the earth settles, I will have it engraved and plant shrubs or flowers in this soil that is more stone than dirt, yet produces grasses and flowers and evergreens.

Jen puts her hands together at her heart and bows to me. I return the gesture, and notice she and Lisa are crying.

I'm not. I have been, and will, but this is a moment not different than when Rich and I met, 36 years and 2 months ago. For no reason at all, I knew: This is everything.

Rich, then wearing a crewcut and his old Boy Scout shorts -- Eagle Scout, actually -- talked to me about his passion for physics and lacrosse and The Lord of the Rings and there was nothing in this that appealed; all of this was on the opposite side of my world.

But being with this boy made me so happy.

Still does.

And that is why the words I read were his words, a gift from Tolkien. He would post them on my dormitory room door, when we thought our road together was only beginning.

But it was not, just a meeting at one time, one place, and we're still on a road that goes ever on.

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and

errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

Still round the corner there many wait

A new road or a secret gate,

And though I oft have passed them by,

A day will come at last when I

Shall take the hidden paths that run

West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

May Rich's life be a blessing for all the world.

Candace