Easter morning I woke early and drove to the library. There I placed a stepping stone for my brother Jim beside his tree in the island’s Cancer Awareness Garden. I’ve been waiting and wanting to do this for a while and Easter morning seemed an appropriate date.

To make the stone, I woke early Friday and went to work soon after sunrise, kneeling on the cold concrete of the garage. Into the wet cement I pressed twelve stones: six from the beach where we released my brother’s ashes in December and six stones I’d saved from the gravel river of our childhood home. I also added seven pieces of sea glass, one I found on the beach in December and the rest from Bainbridge.

I spelled out words with tiles. Perhaps writing by hand would have been preferable but not as legible. I seem to have difficulty making the mix the right consistency for writing. I wanted the words to be clear, to express my love and memory of my brother.

Jim had three brain tumors in his life. The first one announced itself when he was a toddler. Removing the tumor and treating him with chemo and radiation affected my brother’s brain in irreparable ways. He lived the rest of his life developmentally disabled, or what was termed at that time mentally retarded. Jim didn’t speak normally. My brother also ended up significantly short in height. His difficulties were evident to everyone.

When he answered the phone, my brother would say Jim is there. At least that is what I remember from a period of our childhood. Once someone has died, the past is no longer shared. I can’t be corrected. Whatever I remember becomes the truth for now.

Jim is there. A sentence that brings to mind my brother. Both alive and dead. I can still see him talking in the kitchen of our childhood home, the yellow cord dangling down from the wall high above his head, Jim pressing the receiver against his face, speaking his short dialogue, difficult to decipher. Again I am in college, sitting on my bed, holding the phone to my ear, hoping for a glimpse of his world across the miles that separate us, hoping we can still somehow communicate although apart. In San Jose, years later, I am listening to him on the phone as he is sick for the last time with the last tumor, savoring each sentence in my memory because the words are few.

Jim is there. The atoms in his ashes by now have become part of the beach. So perhaps one could say he is there, in the sand and sea of the Olympic Peninsula. But he wasn’t in his body. He borrowed some atoms for a while as a storage case for his soul. Once his body stopped breathing on that December morning years ago, he stopping living here.

Jim is there. He is not here. One passage often read for Easter quotes an angel in the tomb telling the women who had been hoping to prepare Jesus’ body with spices: He is not here; he has risen! I don’t know exactly where Jim is. What happens to the soul, whether resurrection is immediate or delayed, whether we go to heaven now or later, I don’t know. But I know that because Jesus was not in his tomb, so also my brother is not where his body was placed. Someday I will see both of them. Someday I will be there too.

In November, we planted a tree for my brother Jim in the Bainbridge Library’s memorial garden, dedicated to those who suffered from cancer.

Special thanks to Ann Lovejoy and the Friday Tidy crew at the library for all their work, care, compassion and understanding.

It’s a beautiful place, a strip of land between the parking lot and Madison, landscaped with several memorial trees, grasses and other plants in rich compost. I hope others enjoy Jim’s tree too, as they walk or drive past and admire the garden.

The tree planted beside his is an enchanting crabapple.

We also released balloons, one for each in our family. As I was trying to help my mom with the balloons and hold my hat, I lost track of one string, and the blue one went up into the air first, ahead of the rest. Blue was my brother’s favorite color.

Yesterday we released my brother’s ashes into the Pacific Ocean. Jim died five years ago this December, after suffering three brain tumors in his young life.

(I’ve described missing him at Thanksgiving, on his birthday
and the anniversary of his death last year.)

Four of us went to the beach on the Olympic Peninsula. My sister had flown into town the night before, and together with my brother John, we three drove from Bainbridge west to meet my mom in the morning.

Following my sister’s example I chose to put my portion of the ashes in a mug. My sister had one of Jim’s favorite cups for hot cocoa. The mug I used wasn’t a favorite of his, but it was a Christmas gift from an aunt and in our home while we were growing up. When I went to college I took it with me. This mug has been used to water plants, to nourish guests and to feed my own family of five, as well as the family of five of my childhood. Yesterday the mug was used to release my brother’s ashes into the ocean.

We walked into the water wearing waders. The tide was high. We felt the ocean pressure against us. The weather was warm and dry, a certain gift from God on a Northwest December day. The only other December 16th we can remember without rain was the day he died. It was dry as we watched the funeral home employees carry his body out of our house and into their van.

I collected agates from the beach, orange and white rocks bulging in my pocket, memorial stones. The beach was rich with shells and poor with people, occasional dog tracks and shoe prints the only sign of other human presence.

Releasing the ashes into the ocean was both strange and beautiful. I know that my brother left his body years ago. In that sense, his ashes were not significant. Yet the ashes represented someone I loved. They were what remained of Jim. They had belonged to my brother. They were Jim’s atoms, for the time he used them. We were there to honor and remember him, and to release what he had left behind in this life.

Jim’s ashes had a texture somewhere between sand and wood ash. They were gray and gritty with bits of bone at the bottom. Holding them in my hand seemed sad and good at the same time. I put my fingers into the ocean and let my brother’s ashes float away from me. I rinsed out the mug and watched the water flow, gray into blue, cloudy into clear.

Afterwards, we lit candles. We watched the sun rise, first pink then gold against the coast line. Behind us the Olympic mountains appeared through the clouds.

I didn’t cry on the beach. Maybe a tear or two. But I cried in the car, driving up through the dark that morning. Listening to a Christmas song titled Emmanuel, I felt the words God is with us tell me truth. I sensed God being with my brother as he died, escorting him from this life to another one, and I also sensed God being with us that morning, as we were going to return his body into the earth. The weather and the beauty of the beach also blessed us.

Jim was born near Thanksgiving and died in December. Since his death I’ve felt frustrated that the holiday time has turned into a season of sorrow. It belongs to Jim.

But yesterday, as we released my brother’s ashes into the ocean, I realized that the Emmanuel celebrated at Christmas means that God is with us in this life, in the life to come, and as we cross between the two.

When I came home yesterday my arms and legs were sore. My legs hurt from walking on the beach in the waders, which were heavy and stiff in the soft sand, a workout. I’m not sure why my arms ached, perhaps from the weight of carrying the mug of ashes down the beach. The cup felt heavy, heavier than I thought it would, when it was filled, and then lighter as we walked back to our cars.

I’m glad that after five years we were able to gather together as a family and release Jim’s ashes. Whenever I see the ocean of the Olympic Peninsula, I will remember him. Two of my favorite pictures of my brother were taken there.

To think that my brother’s body, gray ash, is now able to become part of another living being or many beings. And I know my brother’s spirit is living and someday again I will be able to see him, a being more glorious than I can imagine.

And the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
- Ecclesiastes 12:7