Ep.30: Scattered
Looking up to 'badgerlands'.
‘Where do you want to be scattered when you die?’ B asks out of the blue. It trips me up in more ways than one and I’m rendered speechless. I don’t know why I should be so surprised at the idea of B considering my death – after all there isn’t a day that passes without my testing the thought against the back of my teeth – and the parent in me feels duty bound to mine into why she’s asking the question but I’m not sure I can go there without crying.
In my mind I start to wander round the significant and important places in my life but there’s not so many. Assynt maybe? The glorious, open, unforgiving ancient hills and lochans of the north west of Scotland, where mum and John first introduced me to the Highands 16 years ago. I picture David and B climbing Stac Pollaidh. We pick our way up the stony path together from the car park, their feet leaden with the weight of what I’ve asked them to do, the actual weight of me warming them to a sweat through the rucksack. However much I’d like a rare, blue sky day, in my head I know it’s more likely to be like pushing through a cloud, the droplets clinging to their clothes like dew. But if the day affords them a view and if they pause before the turn of the path takes them behind the hill then they can gaze at Cul Mor, not knowing it was where I fell in love with this landscape; a nudge further south they’ll see Isle Martin where my laughter from the drunken antics at the Ullapool Dive Club annual BBQ might echo still and just below them, where the road skirts the shore of Loch Lurgainn, they’ll see me in a bright pink jacket on a white Boardman bike fighting through horizontal sleet, wind and rain as I complete my first ever cycle sportive with my friend Fiona. 65 miles of hill after hill after hill which left us filthly, freezing and deliriously triumphant, solidifying my love of cycling and leading to my meeting David just a month later. So if they gaze east they’ll see me cycling here again, this time with David, as we cycle south from Durness to Ullapool on a 450 mile fundraiser for the Highland Hospice.
Yes Assynt might be a place they could scatter me. But when I picture them at the summit, digging their hands into me to lift and tip me onto the breeze (would they use their hands, would they bear to touch me?), when I picture my ashes floating out over lochans, dusting the lichen, heathers and rocky outlines of Suilven, I stall. Could I truly feel at peace in this landscape? This is the hill after all that I once came to on my birthday, in a vortex of depression and misery, to contemplate ending it all. This is the place I come to for self-reflection, to dig deep into the difficult and darker side of my nature, to give me a sense of perspective when perspective is lost. There’s a restlessness here. I leave here in peace but arrive troubled. Somehow the idea of being scattered here feels like I’d be condemned to no-man’s land too far from the people I love.
When Liz, my Aunt, died, following the return of her breast cancer after 20 years in the clear, she asked us to scatter her on flowing water. We gathered near Oxford and following the solemnity of saying good bye to her we had a family party in the nearby pub. We ended up playing football in the meadow by the river and when the ball ended up in the water I thought nothing of stripping down to my underwear and wading in after it, not considering that I might be wading into a watery solution of Liz in the process. She’d have loved listening to the party and the chaos of her nieces, nephews, cousins and siblings from all generations laughing and loving life together. She wouldn’t have minded forming a film over my skin as I retrieved the ball – all the better to watch over me when I followed her path to cancer and mastectomy 5 years after her death.
I like Liz’s choice to float away, to be given freedom to drift, rush or tumble with the fishes in which ever direction the flow chooses. I picture the fall, the shock of the water then the slow separation of all I am while the breeze fills with the sound of laughter, life and love. I like this image so much I map it on to my own landscape, the place that fills my own life with the most love and laughter, and I know that if and when I die I want to be scattered somewhere close to here, close to the Byre. Maybe up above in the birch filled Badgerlands where I could look down at the house and the sounds of our many evenings gathered round the firepit with our friends would float up to meet me as I gaze at the loch. Or maybe in the loch itself where I could watch David fishing on the shore and some future B toasting marshmallows on a fire with her kids, my grandkids, who I may or may not ever know, while she laughs at the memory of her mum’s antics, swimming in the freezing loch in a bid to frighten her cancer into retreat.
I’ll let them choose – is that fair? After all they may not have to choose, I might outlive them all.
And although it pains me to push these ideas around and I want to twist away from the thought of B contemplating her mum’s end or David having to scatter ashes once more, I’ve circled round, once again, to realising how bloody lucky I am. How amazing to have found my resting place already, to have this life which boils over with laughter and friendship and possibility, to have something in each and every day which I know I will cling on to as long as I’m allowed. And once again I’m struck by the idea that pushing these difficult thoughts around is only painful because life is so good. All of our lives will end at some point, none of us knows exactly when, and if cancer has left me so in love with this life that I never want to leave it, never want to be scattered, how lucky am I?