KATHE‘S ASHES
The pandemic years upended everything. Kathe‘s last six months of mental instability were affected by the fears of Covid that hung over us for two years. And then we discovered that pancreatic cancer was probably behind her mental instability and certainly caused her sudden death. Who knows what kind of memorial service we would have had in normal times, but all year we have had to improvise. Because of the pandemic the memorial service had to be put off until it seemed safe a couple of months later. That gave us time to plan a service that honored Kathe with a display of many of the beautiful things she knitted and created, as well as a slide show of her life and a web page at kathemosher.com. On the day of the memorial service (still on You Tube titled Kathe Mosher Memorial Service) we also put some of her ashes on a rock in the Warren Wilson Cemetery where they were washed away in a ceremony attended by family and friends.
And then Susie and I made a pilgrimage to Germany where we celebrated her life with German childhood friends and also as part of a ceremony in her home church of people in Winsen who had died during the year. Susie and I put her ashes around the school building where she lived as a girl, in the Aller River where her brother Bernhard drowned at 17, around the little chapel in Garsson where she was baptized as her father played the organ and in the family plot at the cemetery where her parents and Bernhard were buried. Susie decorated a little birch tree at the site which we adopted as a living memorial.
But because of the pandemic it took almost six months to get a gravestone and to have it carved in the Warren Wilson Cemetery and then once installed it took us another six months to find a time when the family could gather together. After several delays, including my travels and coming down with Covid, on Sunday we finally met, masking and keeping our distance, to put Kathe‘s ashes in a small round hole at the gravesite. We poured her ashes in and then each of us put something significant into the earth along with a handfull of flower petals and a handfull of earth. I read a stanza of Kathe‘s favorite poem, Der Mond Ist Aufgegangen, in German and then Kathe sang a couple of stanzas in a recording that Susie had.
The weather report called for pouring rain, but it was a quiet, cloudy afternoon. The cemetery is a quiet spot with trees all around rimmed with mountains in the distance. It was a quiet, beautiful celebration and we went home feeling good.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 