Looking forward to a day without an agenda, without a long list of horrible things to check off. Back at Spruce Café. Coffee with Paul, Matt and the Tillitts. Not too early. With the memorial behind us, I was anticipating feeling a little better but I’m still distracted and sad. No appetite. Karen wants to share a favorite hike before their flight. I am anxious to see it.

Starting from our house, we pass through a neighborhood heading toward Sunshine Canyon.

Approaching the trailhead, a rock outcropping became visible. As we got closer, there appeared to be a lion’s head at the top of the rock on the left.

John had just recently got a tattoo of a lion on his side. This is the only photo we have of it.

John always liked lions. When he was three, he wanted to be “Scar” from the Lion King for Halloween.

And he shared this on Facebook in February.

And when he called feeling sad after Shelby left for Argentina in July, I sent him this.

It seemed fitting that we were hiking under the watchful gaze of the lion in the rock.

It was a short and beautiful hike with wildflowers still blooming thanks to Boulder’s summer thundershowers. All along we were touched by physical things that were embedded in two of the readings at yesterday’s memorial service. Milkweed, a Monarch butterfly (a very tattered one), blue jays. Tall shafts of grain shimmering in the morning light, licking our arms as we passed. John was with us.

 Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner  (excerpt)

Still none of us found anything to say. Air moving uphill from the woods and lake stirred the seeding flower-heads of Delphinium that rose above the wall. A Monarch butterfly caught in the draft was lifted twenty feet over our heads. I saw Sid look away to follow the Monarch’s movement. Perhaps he was fantasizing, as I was, that there went part of what had once been the mortal substance of relatives who had passed before this, absorbed by the root of a beech tree in the village cemetery, incorporated into a beechnut, eaten by a squirrel, dropped as a pellet in a meadow, converted into a milkweed stalk, nibbled and taken in by this butterfly, destined to be carried south on a long, unlikely, interrupted migration, to be picked off by a flycatcher, brought back north in the spring as other flesh, laid in an egg, eaten by a robbing jay and laid as another kind of egg, blown out of a tree in a windstorm, to melt into the earth yet again, and thrust upward again, immortal, in another milkweed stalk preparing itself to feed more Monarch butterflies.

Do not stand at my grave and weep

I am not there. I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry;

I am not there. I did not die.

-Mary Elizabeth Frye