Looking back, I never could have predicted I would find myself, at the age of twenty-four, 15,000 feet above sea level, 7,000 miles from home, smack dab in the middle of Tibet with a pack full of rocks on my back.
It had been more than two months since I had set foot on the Tibetan plateau. When I arrived, I was not what you would have called “outdoorsy.” By two months in, I had lived in a tent through rain, snow, and gusting winds, covered miles and miles on foot in heavy-duty leather boots, and eaten the meat of a goat that had been alive when we purchased it. What I had not done in that time was had a shower or used a toilet or spoken to anyone but our small team–two fellow graduate students, Paul and Mike, two Tibetan drivers, and a colleague from a Chinese university. We moved as a unit across the vast expanse of wilderness, occasionally encountering families of nomads, or passing through small towns where the locals would follow me behind mud huts to watch me squat for a piss. To them I was strange, a white woman wearing pants and a backpack traveling with a group of men. It was 1999, and most of them had never seen a white woman.
Paul, Mike, and I were doing geological research and spent the days mapping our way through red-walled canyons of sandstones that used to flow in ancient rivers, up to mountain passes carved by glaciers, and over round and knobby bodies of granite, the remnants of now-extinct magma chambers. The highest passes were often decorated with prayer flags in sun-faded hues of yellow, green, and blue. Sometimes we would find these shrines in unexpected places, little hidden gems where the local people had felt a reason to send prayers into the sky with every flutter of a flag. Tibetans have many ways of sending their intentions into the sky, including the prayer wheels they spin while walking through the streets of Lhasa or circumnavigating Mount Kailas in the west. Sometimes, they rely on the birds.
On this day, we were in the northern region of the central Tibetan wildlife refuge known as the Qiangtang. The rocks we were studying were granites, which form when molten rock cools slowly beneath Earth’s surface. The white color of the granite told us that it had formed somewhere within Earth’s upper layer known as the crust, as opposed to the deeper, darker mantle that begins close to 100 km down. These were things we knew, innately, as budding geologists. Reading and interpreting the rocks was our job, and we had gotten adept at working quickly, our bodies now well-adjusted to the lack of oxygen, and our minds clued into the local rock formations after months of working through southern and central Tibet. But these rocks were different: the surfaces glimmering with shiny crystal faces were splattered with crimson stains, in places the red appearing to have seeped into the rock like water into cloth, spreading into splotches washed out by the sun.
Mike and I had never been to Tibet before, but Paul, on his third Tibet expedition, clearly knew what this was. He crouched and quietly put his hands on the warm rocks in front of him.
We took in the clues around us. Behind one boulder, barely visible, rumpled clothes of all types — shirts, shoes, jackets — were scattered across the landscape in no identifiable pattern. I tried to explain it away as something innocuous, a Tibetan clothing exchange of sorts, or maybe a trash dump.
And then it hit me; the red was blood.
It was a sky burial site, and we were standing on top of it. The rocks were stained red from the blood of those who had been laid here, cleaved here, and left here to be taken away by the birds.
Sky burial is a sacred tradition, one that is held to the highest level of secrecy and honor. It is the way Tibetans handle their dead, and it is stunningly beautiful and gory at the same time. Paul knew about it–he had seen a sky burial site during a previous Tibet trip, stumbling upon one accidentally, which is the only way a westerner would happen to see one. A sky burial is done quietly, in an out-of-the-way place, never to be found by anyone but those who participate in the ritual. The ritual is carried out in a rocky area upon which a body is dismembered, the parts of which are made available to the birds that will, by consuming them, carry the person’s spirit off to heaven when they fly away. What is left behind is a place stained with the blood of the dead and littered with clothing, cutlery, and remnants of solid bone.
My eyes were drawn to a small striped shirt, likely that of a child. The thought of what had happened here left me shaken; I wasn’t sure if I was revolted or moved. How could anyone take a knife to the body of a little boy or girl? How could one apply such force and exertion to cleave a corpse apart? I knew the Tibetans were not afraid of death. We learned from our drivers that the Buddhist way means that the life of even the smallest creature has value, and so, too, does death, when it comes naturally as it is meant to. Death was not something to recoil from. While to us the idea of disassembling a human body might seem like mutilation, to them it was a celebration, knowing that in doing so they were sending their loved one far away from the burdens of this life.
But that little striped shirt. It was just lying there among so many clothes from so many sky burials, mingled in with white scarves that had been lovingly wrapped around the necks of the dead. Lives memorialized in cloth and rubber and drops of blood. Reminders of who these people were before the birds took them. Rusty knives lay abandoned, no longer sharp enough to hack at skin, sinew, and joints. It was almost too much to bear.
I looked down at my boots, worn to a dull gray, scraped apart by months on the ragged rocks, and saw them against the background of lifeblood that had spilled from someone’s body. I had the urge to sit down–it seemed more respectful than treading on this place with my utilitarian footwear.
“Is this sky burial? Are we on a sky burial site?” Mike asked. His question wasn’t accompanied by his usual lighthearted chuckle.
“It is,” came Paul’s reply, his hand grazing the discolored rock surface as he scrutinized the scene.
I didn’t reach for my camera. This picture wasn’t mine to take.
But it began to map onto my memory, much like the picture of my own father’s death and burial, tattooed on my brain as if etched by strong acid over the six weeks it took to lose him.
I had been nineteen, an English major coming home to spend the summer with my dad. I didn’t know he was dying. I had no coping tools for the loss of anyone, let alone the person I trusted most in the world. Nobody close to me had ever died, not even a grandparent, so my schooling on this topic was beginning with the most advanced material. I know now it must have been worse for my grandparents, losing their only child. Like the people whose child had worn that striped shirt, what must it have been like to watch their baby go? Was it harder for the Tibetans, knowing their child would be dismembered, the little body reduced to pieces? Or is it worse to take a corpse, dress it up in fine clothes, put it on display for a crowd of people, most of whom the deceased didn’t spend much time with in life, and then bury it in the ground under six feet of dirt?
I visited my father every day that summer. In a hospital room, I watched his body deteriorate into a 115-pound shell of the tall, cheerful man I once knew. Most days we just sat together, as he was losing his voice to a cancerous tumor deep in his neck. But it was congestive heart failure that had put him there, a sign that his transplanted kidney was failing. He had been a transplant recipient in 1972 and was told he had three years to live and would never have children. Twenty-one years and one child later, the immunosuppressant drugs he took to keep that kidney functioning had taken their toll on him, and cancer began to creep in. This was not his first bout — he had had surgery a couple of years before to remove a tumor from his mouth. At the time, I hadn’t understood that it was just the beginning of what was to ultimately take his life. I know now that I didn’t want to understand. We have such a different relationship with death than the Tibetans do, seeing it as cruel and unfair, especially when it affects those who we deem to be too young to die. My father fit that bill. He was only fifty years old. But the kidney was done and without dialysis, his body would go septic. The tumor would grow to impede his windpipe and take his air, too.
My stepmother, Suzy, was his constant companion. She was a nurse, and she took good care of him. Brushed his teeth. Helped him eat. Heaved him the ten steps it took to get to the bathroom, her right hand gripping the top of his underwear and pulling them down so he could fall quickly onto the toilet and void his bowels. In those moments I stood and faced the window, watching the traffic on the distant highway, people going about their business, wondering how we had ended up like this.
One day, as I went to take the chair next to his bed, he grabbed my forearm, his guitarist fingers calloused and rough against my wrist. His eyes were such a dark shade of brown they were almost black — he wasn’t wearing his aviator sunglasses now, the ones he wore religiously, indoors and out, because of his cataracts. His hand on my arm was bony, IV tubes going in and out of it. I knew he wanted to say something.
“Sit here with me, bug,” he whispered.
I sat down on his left side, between his frail body and the arm that held onto me. He started to cry, his dark eyes brimming as he turned his face away from me, embarrassed for me to see.
“Honey, I love ya. More than anything. You know that, right?”
“Dad, I know,” I replied, trying to keep my voice steady.
I waited for more, but he couldn’t speak. His chest heaved with the exertion of his sobs. We sat there for a while, just crying next to each other, looking out his window. The sky was overcast, typical for my lakeside hometown of Rochester, NY. It was a day he and I would have been fishing on that lake, if things were different.
He tugged me down next to him and I lay in the crook of his arm, my head resting on his shoulder. I hadn’t laid with him like that since I was a little girl. I used to bury my head in his arm pit during the old black and white vampire movies he loved so much, scared of what was to come. I had the urge to do it again.
“Bug, promise me you will get your education. Then do whatever you want, but first get your education. Nobody can take that away from you.”
“I will, Dad. I promise.”
The next day, he quit dialysis. As the nurse wheeled his bed toward the door of his hospital room to take him and hook him up to a machine that would suck the blood out of him, clean it, and push it back in through a plastic tube, he shook his head no. He looked at his wife, who had been there by his side every moment of every day since he arrived in that place, and mouthed, “I’m done.” He made the choice to die by sepsis, instead of waiting to die by suffocation.
How does anybody make that choice?
Suzy called from the hospital and said to come. I tried to stay afloat in the unfamiliar waters of losing a parent, as my grandparents were drowning in the reality of losing their only child. When we walked in his room, Suzy was sitting on the bed with him. I saw his arm, moving a lot, like the wing of a bird whose other wing is injured, trying to take flight. She talked to him quietly, stroked his black hair barely showing any gray, and told him she loved him. I stood still and watched this scene for a moment, such a devastating and lovely thing going on between two people. I had no idea how Suzy would go on after he died. She had no children of her own. He was her whole life.
I tiptoed around the foot of his bed, past my grandparents who were huddling in a corner together afraid to look at their son. Suzy had the curtains open, the sun streaming in and the blue sky visible. He caught sight of me then, and immediately he smiled. It was so typical of him, smiling as if to say all was well, trying to comfort me even as the life drained out of him. I took his hand and he nodded then. We sat there, Suzy and I, one on either side of him, as he fell into sleep and his breathing slowly faded.
My father died peacefully on August 11, 1993, with his second wife, parents, and only child surrounding him. When it was over, I stood at the foot of his bed in shock. I couldn’t stop staring at him. His skin looked green.
I planned my father’s funeral. I picked out a coffin. I ordered flowers and set up viewing hours. I spoke to reporters about his obituary — he had been a local celebrity (musician, comedy club owner, golf store owner) and people were interested. I met with the priest, planned out his mass, booked a space for a reception, and arranged for his burial. Suzy and I chose a headstone together and had both their names carved into the crystalline granite speckled with black mica. Mica: a flat, shiny mineral that would catch light on its plate-like surfaces and glint in the sun.
The calling hours were pandemonium. Hundreds of people came — many of them strangers to me — who had known my dad over the years. The most wonderful thing I witnessed over the course of our memorial activities, more wonderful than all the people who came to say they had loved my dad, was my mother remembering the love she had felt for him. They divorced when I was seven, and I hadn’t seen that side of her in so long. It broke my heart in the very best way. There, together in loss, I loved her so much in her vulnerability, because for the first time in a long time we were in total agreement in what we were feeling. For once, we were hurting together.
Suzy and I stood next to the open casket, shaking the hands of all the people my father had touched in his short lifetime. The line of people snaked out the funeral home door, into the parking lot and around the building. We had to add more viewing hours, and I stood by his body through them all, as every part of me ached. I would steal glances at my father, the rosary beads wrapped around his strong hands, his slicked hair, the makeup on his face. I didn’t cry as the masses filed past and paid their respects. I smiled and nodded and thanked them for coming. Suzy reached down into the coffin and mussed Dad’s hair. “He doesn’t look like himself,” she muttered. “I shouldn’t have put him in the sport coat.” No golf pants and collared shirt for him. No aviator sunglasses worn every day of his life. Only his Sunday best.
“If nothing else,” my father had said, “I want Desperado played at my funeral.” I turned the lyrics over in my head and realized what they meant to him. Letting those who love you in before you lose them forever. The priest had been unsure about playing the song (I think it was against church policy), but I told him it was non-negotiable. He asked to see the words and I wrote them out on notebook paper, from memory, sitting across from him at a wooden table in the rectory of the church. The basement rec room where for years I had participated in youth group was directly beneath me. He read the words carefully while I waited.
“It’s a beautiful song,” he said.
I delivered my father’s eulogy in the church where my parents had married, where I was baptized and had my first communion and was confirmed a Catholic and attended Sunday masses. I played that song from the altar, the last thing I would ever do for Dad. It felt like a thread between us, holding us together before they put him in the ground.
Two days later, I sat next to the mound of turned earth that covered his casket, and ran my fingers over his name, etched deeply into the dark stone that would mark his final resting place. It was upstate in summer, a place I always returned to, where my bones felt connected to the soft grass, tall maple trees, and lake breezes. The cemetery we buried him in was only a few miles from Lake Ontario, and I could smell the lake in the air, sure that the wind was crossing over that ice-aged body of water as it made its way to Dad’s grave. I could hear leaves rustling, a sound I love to this day. It crossed my mind to quit then. To change plans. My dad had left me a controlling portion of his business, and if I wanted to, I could simply take over the golf store and live there in that lakeside city, where every bit of him was, and would be, forever. I could tend his grave, and fish where we used to fish, and walk where we used to walk, and be surrounded by the sounds and smells of the nineteen short years we had had together. My car, loaded up with the remnants of my shattered summer, was parked at the foot of his grave, waiting for my decision. Inside were cut off jean shorts, bathing suits that still smelled of lake water, and an introductory geology book from a class I had finished that year. A book I had kept even though I was an English major, because it had sparked my curiosity.
But staying would be the easy thing to do. It would not be an education.
Sometimes it takes an earthquake leveling everything to the studs to make room for rebuilding. Sometimes the best parts of us are unearthed from the rubble of a disaster. I didn’t know it that day, but I was about to make a choice that would forever change my life. It started with that geology book, the corner of which I caught sight of as I opened the driver’s side door of my car.
I pulled it out and placed it on my lap as I sat behind the wheel. I flipped through the first few pages, noticing the yellow highlighted portions I had been drawn to as I sat by the lake, reading. “…when compared to the earth, the moon is a lifeless body wandering through space and time.” What a notion, Earth being life-full and traveling with intent. It seemed hopeful and irresistible.
I began the drive back to school before the dirt over my father’s casket had settled.
Sitting on the rocks in Tibet with peoples’ blood underneath me, flashing back on those memories of how it had all gone down with my dad, it struck me how much closure must come from a sky burial. No gravesite to visit for years and years to come. No need to trim weeds or plant marigolds around the name of your loved one. Leave it to the birds and honor only memories. Thousands of miles away, the bones of my father lay on a bed of sateen in a box in the earth, his flesh long gone, eaten by small creatures (like the birds, but out of sight). We had done our earth burial, and then I had left. His gravesite called to me sometimes.
I realized then that I was getting the education I had promised Dad I would get, in a way neither of us could ever have imagined. A suburban girl from upstate NY, with no camping experience, who had only ever wanted to be a performer, was on the highest plateau on Earth on a journey to becoming a woman in STEM. A geologist. It was the gift he gave to me. The gift of freedom. The encouragement to take chances.
“Should we go?” Paul asked.
I took a deep breath and looked around at the wild, open space. The mountains in the distance. The white granite that formed hundreds of millions of years prior to that moment, before we even existed, before death brought the body of a child there, and before death set me on a new and unexpected path to becoming a scientist.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Time to move on.”
