As in:
Patrick’s memorial to his brother, Evan, would be no cross of marble, no gilded box full of ashes. It would be the image of two coyotes, created from bronze, and perched on the rim of a small basalt mesa in a sparely beautiful wash in the Crab Creek drainage. One coyote would be howling to the winter moon, the other looking down into the wash, waiting for a vole or rabbit.
Oh dear God of solace I know not,
of places we’ve yet to go,
arm in arm. Would thy grace be so willing,
to fill the emptiness in my heart?
When he was done placing the monument and speaking his prayer he walked back alone, toward the silence of his truck, watching the flaming purple-rose skirts of running low clouds as they were torn and then reborn, gliding toward the mountains in the east.
The information in the obituary could only gesture toward the truth, he decided. His brother could in no way be measured in words, or years, or in the names of those left behind. He could only be measured by the thick warmth of his shoulders and the lacerating joy of his spirit. Amen.
If God were reasonable she would at least give me something impossible to bend my will against, he thought. A massive rock to lift. A dark ocean to swim. A glacier to thaw with the heat of my passion, or the anger of my loss.
He came back to the wash in early January, where the twin coyote looking for prey held a small cluster of snow between his metal ears. It seemed slightly comical, in a way he was sure Evan would have appreciated.
The pedestal-like mesa was collared with red-twig dogwood which, in its winter-cranberry coat, glistened in the sun. It was beautiful enough to reaffirm the notion that going on with life would be the right thing to do.
