From Here to Eternity

In Western Massachusetts, there's a famous cemetery plot known as the Sedgwick Pie. At its center are the graves of a prominent judge, politician and abolitionist named Theodore Sedgwick, his wife, Pamela, and their maid, Mumbet, a former slave whose freedom Sedgwick had won. For two centuries, descendants of the judge have been buried around him in concentric circles, with their feet pointed toward the center. The story goes that Judge Sedgwick prescribed this odd pattern so that when the trumpet sounds on Judgment Day and the dead are raised, all his progeny will rise up facing him.

The idea of physical resurrection has a long history, much older than Christianity, which until recently limited the acceptance of cremation. It was thought that when God decided to restore the dead, He would prefer to find them in one piece. The taboo is rapidly changing, though, as society grows more secular and many faiths and denominations have given their blessing. A generation ago, less than 10 percent of America's dead were cremated each year; by 2005, the year of Marilyn's death, the number had climbed to about one-third. In some Western states, including Marilyn's adopted home of Colorado, cremations now outnumber burials. There are many reasons for these changing attitudes, including lower funeral costs and milder environmental impact, but there can be little doubt that changing religious views play a part. Cremation rates still tend to be lower in places where Protestant fundamentalists and theologically conservative Catholics are concentrated. Take Jay's home state of Arkansas, for instance: Only about 20 percent of corpses are cremated there.

In fact, Jay worried at first that his wife had made the wrong choice, and I think it was a tribute to his respect for her that he followed through with her wishes. Over time, though, he seemed to gravitate to my wife's view that Marilyn had been set free of a body that had given her too much pain and too little joy for too many years. The idea of leaving that wheelchair and mounting the winds, of gliding into eternity from her favorite mountaintop, had a poetry that drew him in. This image certainly helped Karen. As the months went by between her mother's memorial service and our trip to Longs Peak, waves of grief ebbed and flowed unpredictably. And I sometimes overheard Karen singing a gospel standard, just above a whisper, the one with the refrain that goes:

I'll fly away, oh, glory!

I'll fly away.

When I die, hallelujah by and by,

I'll fly away.

Meanwhile, I researched the federal government's stance on scattering ashes in the wilderness. I discovered a less-said-the-better attitude. The national Forest Service, for example, declares on its Web page that it has no regulations on the subject. The National Park Service is more enigmatic, directing inquiries to the individual parks, few of which have anything to say one way or the other. At Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii, you can't scatter ashes in the crater, which is rather ironic. You need a permit to scatter ashes on Mount Rainier.

I read carefully through the regulations for Rocky Mountain National Park, but I couldn't find anything. So I sent an inquiry using a form on the park's Internet site. When that produced no answer, I sent a letter to park headquarters. This, too, went unanswered.

Which made perfect sense to me. Why should rangers be typing at computers or processing mail when they could be outdoors saving paradise? They really don't need a policy, because scattering cremated remains on a windswept granite peak has zero environmental impact. The intense heat of cremation, well over 1,000 degrees for several hours, is an effective antibiotic and disinfectant. Chemist Gayle O'Neill of TEI Analytical once analyzed the residue, and found it to be about half phosphate (fertilizer), a quarter calcium (it's mostly bone), 10 percent sulfate and dwindling amounts of potassium, sodium, various oxides and silica (also known as sand). Trace metals also showed up in her test: magnesium, iron, zinc. Perhaps someone's last meal included a multivitamin.

We settled on July 27, 2006, for the climb, about 10 months after Marilyn's death. Joel and I decided to take our families to Estes Park a few days early so that they could vacation while we adjusted to the altitude. Having five little kids around made it impossible to feel morbid. They scampered up mini-mountains and gulped root beer and stalked the nearly tame elk of Rocky Mountain National Park. Jim Somerville spent those days backpacking with old chums near Aspen. He finished that trip on the 26th, then drove five hours through the mountains to Estes Park, arriving stiff-legged and footsore at about 10 p.m. Four hours later, the alarm went off.

The weather report called for clearing skies, but when I stepped outside to check, lightning danced behind a scrim of clouds, glowing, vanishing, here, there. A muffled storm stretched in every direction.