Ashes in the Wind

At the Colorado-Utah border, under a sherbet sunrise, I opened the jar. A raven dipped low, wings slicing the air with a kind of knowing. It hovered, looked us in the eye—really looked—and then soared west into the painted sky. We didn’t speak for a moment.

We’d been driving through that hour when the desert shifts from bruise to blush, the sky aching into color like it couldn’t help but reveal itself. Still fogged by sleep, the world outside felt half-dreamed, and so did we—legs stiff, hips tight from the long miles. The kind of morning where silence isn't awkward, just soft. Inside the car, the heater whispered. Matty kept one hand on the wheel, the other resting lightly on the gearshift, eyes scanning the horizon like he was listening for something beyond sound.

We didn’t have a plan. That was the plan.

He’d been in the garage. Tucked into a cabinet behind winter boots and rusted camping gear. A forgotten corner. A quiet shame. Sealed away—like grief, like history. Trapped, much like his life—trapped in a body that no longer fit the wildness of his spirit, in a marriage that offered more bruise than balm, in a world that taught men to muscle through pain until it devoured them.

Sometimes I’d open that cabinet and just look at the box. Not open it. Just look. As if the weight of it might tell me something. But it never did. Just silence. Just dust.

It was time to free him.

But how do you say goodbye to someone who left without saying goodbye? How do you let go of the person who built your wonder and burned it down in the same breath?

He showed me how to read animal tracks, cradle a snake without flinching, and listen to trees. He gave me awe. He gave me silence. He gave me stories in the language of moss and river.

And then he disappeared. Into pain. Into pills. Into a kind of aloneness no one could follow.

I had lost him long before he became ash. But I was still carrying him.

No map of where to let him go. Just a feeling I would follow. As I do in life—intuitively, messily, guided by the ache in my chest and the way the light hits a place.

Matty, who normally thrives on control, had surrendered to this. His willingness to follow me into the unplanned—that was one of the most generous things he’s ever given me.

He turned off the road suddenly, so suddenly it jolted me.

Gravel crackled beneath us. He looked over, eyes soft. “Here,” he said. "Right at the border. Sunrise. Is this okay?"

It was more than okay. It was perfect. One of those quiet moments between two people who’ve weathered years of joy, sorrow, and everything between. The kind of intimacy that doesn’t need explaining.

He was already out of the car, reaching into the backseat for the bag—the one that held the box where my father now lived.

We layered up. Sweatshirts over yesterday’s shirts. The air bit at our skin like it wanted something. My fingers shook as I pulled out the container—beige, rigid, sealed in a gallon ziplock. It rustled like a snack pack. It rustled like grief.

I hated that part. That the man who taught me the names of trees, who once carried me across a swollen river, now fit into something you could tuck behind the cereal.

But the wind wasn’t howling. The earth was still. Maybe that was mercy.

We walked until the land opened. The hush around us settled like a blanket. The horizon stretched wide. The sky spilled—pinks into oranges into gold. A watercolor accident left out to dry. It pressed against my chest like a hand.

We stopped. The jar in my hands. Matty behind me, wrapping his around mine. The weight between us more than ash. A decade of words unsaid. A lifetime of things too hard to name.

I breathed.

"Wherever you are now, I hope it feels like home," I whispered.

And I did. Fingers trembling. Air sharp as flint.

The ashes lifted—slow, curious—as if deciding whether the wind was trustworthy. Then they danced. Spiraled upward in a grace I didn’t know I believed in.

Above us, the raven returned. A sentinel in the sky.

We didn’t speak walking back. The silence was full. Thick. Holy.

At the car, the raven dove—so low we flinched. Its wings carved air. Its eyes met mine. Then it vanished.

Matty reached across the console. Found my hand.

His grip: steady. Nothing to fix. Just a holding.

Tears came—not sobbing. Just warmth and salt. Not grief, exactly. More like recognition. That this mattered.

I pressed play. Joni Mitchell’s voice filled the car, raw and heartbreakingly beautiful.

I could hear my dad, always waxing poetic about her: her chords, her wordplay, how she built and broke a line.

We drove on. Let her guide us through the vast quiet. Her voice a benediction.

We didn’t speak for miles.

I stared out the window, watching the desert roll by, scrub brush blurring into shadow and light. I thought of how different it would be for Matty when his time comes to mourn. There will be casseroles. Stories. Laughter around a full table. He won’t have to invent grief rituals from scratch.

And still, he came here with me. No script. Just steady hands and open silence. Just showing up.

When it’s his turn —when that sharp, quiet grief comes—I’ll hold space the way he held it for me. Even if our endings look nothing alike.

I thought of my dad—not the box, not the ending—but the man he was before.

Before the sickness. Before the silence.

He was magic. Made things grow where nothing should. He trained horses, spoke in tones that calmed even the wildest mare. Every stray—limping, broken—somehow found our garage. He’d kneel beside them like it was nothing. A bird. A cat. A squirrel with a bent leg. He just knew.

He taught me to ride horses. To watch leaves turn before rain. To plant for beauty and for bees. He could whistle and the dogs would come, tails thumping like they were hearing a hymn.

That man—that version of him—still lived in me.

And I had carried him long enough.

It was time to let that part fly, too.

Months before the road trip—before the raven, before the sunrise—I had carried some of him into the wilderness. Into the Tetons. Thirty days deep in the most remote backcountry in the Lower 48, Hawks Rest—where cell signal gives up, where the only clocks are the sun and your own hunger.

I was cooking for a mule trip. Riding in with a string of animals and a pack of strangers. The air out there tastes different—like glacier water and pine smoke and the sound of your own breath. It pressed against my cheeks with a crisp coolness, sharp and clean, like something you could live on if you had to. Every inhale felt earned.

I brought a small pouch of his ashes. Just a little. Enough to say something, if the place felt right.

And one day it did. Midway through the trip, the sky opened clean and blue, a kind of stillness that asks something of you. The herd grazed nearby, heads down, tails flicking in rhythm. I hiked alone to the headwaters of the Yellowstone, a winding ribbon of water that felt both timeless and new.

I talked to him the whole way.

Told him about the camp, the riders, the wind in my teeth. Told him he would’ve loved it out there—the way the wild folds around you, unbothered by time. The way the mule bells clinked like wind chimes in the early morning, or how the hush at dusk felt thick enough to hold. The smell of wet earth, the scratch of juniper on your shins—he would’ve soaked it all in, grinning. I thanked him. For the awe. For the animals. For giving me that language, even if he forgot how to speak it later.

At a bend in the river, beneath the quiet gaze of Hawks Rest—watching like a stone sentinel—I built a mandala. My knees sunk into cool, coarse sand. The ache in my thighs from days in the saddle pulsed low and constant, grounding me. I placed stones with care, found feathers caught in wind-thinned branches, and pulled out a piece of petrified wood I’d carried for weeks—just in case. Dragonflies hovered and landed, one after another, delicate and insistent. It felt like they’d been summoned—something watching, saying: yes, now.

I steadied myself. The river’s voice rose beside me—cold, clear, and fast. I opened the pouch with calm hands. No trembling, no panic. I was ready. The dust inside didn’t feel like him, not really. Not like the warm smell of hay on his jacket or the whistle he used to call the dogs home. Not like the leather of his saddle or the rasp of his laugh when I finally got the garden rows straight. The ashes were dry and silent, but he had never been either of those things—not until the very end. But it caught the sun as it fell, and in that moment, it shimmered. Like breath. Like memory let loose.

"You were always part of this place," I said. "Now it gets to hold you back."

The current took him.

The light shifted. A breeze moved through the trees like a hush.

It didn’t feel like release. Not exactly. More like a returning.

How do you grieve someone alone? When there’s no memorial, no slideshow, no hands pressed into yours saying he was a good man, no stories passed around like bread?

How do you mourn the person who made you—and unmade you—when you're the only one left to remember both sides?

You invent your own ritual—not for them, but for the part of yourself that needs to be unburdened. For the version of you that needs to be unburdened.

Out there in the Tetons, the ritual came without planning. No candles. No priest. Just river and rock, wind and will. I think the land knew what to do even before I did.

That was the ceremony.

Not for a good death, but for a tangled, half-shadowed life—the kind shaped by pain, wildness, silence, and devotion in uneven measure. Not for closure, but for release. Not for peace, but for permission—to keep living without him. Without the weight.

I walked back lighter.

But I still had more of him to let go.

More of the ache. More of the in-between.

There were pieces of him tucked in plastic bags and corners of my mind that still hadn’t been aired out. The grief was layered—part love, part rage, part longing for the dad who played his trombone too loud on Sunday mornings, who argued with passion about The Who, who called me 'Sissy' and reached for my hand before every great backyard adventure, and part mourning for the one who left without a word.

I wasn’t finished yet.

But I was learning how to begin.

He is in the river now. In the sky above Utah. In my hands, in the garden, in every feral thing that finds its way to shelter.

And I’m still learning how to let go. Not all at once. But piece by piece, across this wild country that raised us both in different ways.

© Heather Zoccali 2025