HUELLA VERDE

Canyonlands’
Needles district
PHOTOGRAPHY BYTONDA/ISTOCK
much, much longer. We let her go on July 24, 2015. She was only 60.
I’d known right away that I wanted to do something private,
something personal, to remember her. The two of us had lived
alone together from when I was 7 to when I left for college at 19,
sometimes acting more like roommates than mother and child—
ordering delivery pizza on Friday evenings; staying up too late
talking on school nights; watching the Olympics on TV and giggling
about the male athletes’ physiques—and I wanted to honor
that closeness. She and my stepfather had purchased burial plots
“I I wanted
someplace wild,
something that
couldn’t or wouldn’t
be fenced off
or paved over.
”
in a city I’d never lived in
and rarely visited; I suspected
her gravesite there
wouldn’t mean much to me.
I’d asked my stepdad if I
could have a portion of her
ashes to scatter myself, at
a location of my choosing,
and he’d agreed easily. After
the burial, the funeral
director handed me a small
velvet drawstring bag and
a letter from the funeral
home, certifying that I had
a right to carry these particular human remains around with me.
The question, then, was where to scatter them. I thought about
my home, in the Yukon Territory: There was a beautiful wild river
that ran right through town, and I could visit it any time I wanted.
But my mom had only been there twice, and it was a place where
I had built a life apart from her—somehow that didn’t feel right
to me. There was a man-made, murky canal that ran through the
neighborhood where I’d grown up, back in Ottawa—but then, both
of us had long since moved on from our lives there together.
A laid-back hotel for forward
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open-minded travelers. A hub
of inspiration for incredible
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