Sunny Autumn Sobriety
 

A very close friend of mine died a little while back of complications from Parkinson’s Disease. They put his ashes in a stream joining a river nearby which ran into the Atlantic Ocean. He had a close relative or friend in Ireland and those who survived him hoped that eventually some part of him might wash up on its western shores.
I remember, when we were young, he and I put on our sneakers and hiked in and along a stream which ran by our house in the mountains. We traced it up and up. At one point we came across an old abandoned wooden trestle which had been used by miners in the distant past to get their coal or, perhaps, their iron, across the stream. We went on, higher and higher, eventually tracing the stream to a small trickle. We had arrived at a sunny upland, a place where few ever went, with a beautiful view of a nearby mountain ridge.
After my friend’s death I thought that perhaps we are like water, little streams when we are young, gathering depth, strength as we grow older, becoming a river and, eventually, joining the sea. Not really dying but merging with something greater, perhaps coming “home”. For did not that little stream, where we started when young, come from the rain and did not the rain come ultimately from evaporation, from the sea? The process, the cycle, is endless. In that sense there is no death, only rebirth, an endless journey. As T.S. Eliot said in his Four Quartets: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
Today, 26 years sober, but not far from death (my doctors say that it might well happen in three or four years), I felt so happy. The sun was shining, the Autumn leaves were turning. Soon I might be going “home” again. Sobriety has made the sun shine for me. May it also shine upon you and may you go “home” at last and be reborn to go higher on the path which you have chosen.

Here is the little poem I wrote in memory of my friend:

Somewhere, at the top of the mountain
Somewhere
That’s where it all began.
Perhaps from a hidden spring,
Trickling through daisies,
Golden rod of a summer afternoon
Sparkling clear, warm in the sunlight

Down the steep slope
Gathering itself and growing,
Joined by its neighbors,
Running more swiftly
Under some decaying mining trestle
Forgotten in the dense forest.
Joining now the river,
Flowing downward to the sea.

Receive now his ashes
And may they join the ocean
Home, from which he came,
Washing the Irish shores
A land he loved so much.

Has he gone or is he still there?
Some small part gathered up
In clouds, again to rain
On secret meadows
Again on mountain tops,
Back to where he started,
And knowing the place for the first time.

W.