“Do you know where you’re going?” Genuine concern edged the driver’s voice as he stood at the open bay of the Greyhound bus with hands on hips, sizing up the small, gray-haired woman. She was dressed in Army surplus pants and a plaid shirt, and she had asked to be let off at a stop sign where the only sign of life was a coal-black raven perched on a pinyon tree. The lonely intersection marked the beginning of a two-lane road leading into the Sierra Nevada, but it was February, and the route was closed for the winter.
The woman extracted a beat-up backpack and a pair of cross-country skis from the cavernous bay. “I’m on my way to visit my daughter.” She gave the driver a confident smile. “I’ll be okay. She’s skiing out halfway to meet me.”
The driver studied the empty road for a possible destination, shielding his eyes from the brilliance of snow-mantled mountains. “Halfway from where?”
“From Yosemite National Park.” Her eyes glittered like those of a kid headed for the beach. “My daughter lives in Yosemite, on the other side of those mountains. We plan to meet at Tioga Pass and stay in the cabin up there. Tomorrow we’ll ski the rest of the way.”
The driver frowned. Tioga Pass was a good twelve miles up that road, and although it marked the east entrance to Yosemite National Park, no one manned the station during the winter. At an elevation of ten thousand feet—twice as high as Denver, Colorado—the entrance station and ranger cabin were probably boarded up and crusted with ice. The driver fidgeted with his cap, wondering if he should notify the county sheriff of a potential mishap-in-the-making. At least they would know where he had last seen this eccentric woman, should someone report her missing.
Though her story seemed that of a wandering senior, her comportment told him otherwise. Her face was craggy and lined from years in the sun, and her movements revealed the balance and brawn of an outdoor hiker. The driver was curious about her, but there was no time to ask additional questions. He had other passengers to deliver and a schedule to follow. “Well, take care. I hope your daughter meets up with you.”
That singular woman was my mother, in 1976, at the age of fifty-four. In those days, there was no gas station or deli near the intersection of Highways 395 and 120 in California, only the sagebrush-covered hillsides of Lee Vining Canyon and a road strewn with boulders. After the bus rumbled off, my mother strapped each ski to one side of her pack and tied them together at the top like an inverted V. With her ski poles serving as walking sticks, she shouldered her load and began her slow, persistent hike up the hill. The distance from other humans increased with every mile and with every thousand feet in elevation, and eventually, snow covered the highway. She unlashed her skis, waxed them for friction, and shuffled onward.
At the time, my husband and I were working as backcountry rangers for the National Park Service. After the cross-mountain highway had been closed for the winter, our role was to protect park property from break-ins and provide assistance as needed to the occasional skiers who ventured across the Sierra Nevada. Our government cabin at Tuolumne Meadows had electricity but no running water. We melted snow for all our liquid needs. Those were the days before cell phones and instant communication, and I could only hope my mother would make it to Tioga Pass when I struck out on skis from our cabin that morning. She lived in Washington state, and her visit required two days on a Greyhound bus as well as the two-day ski trip. There were many points along the way where her journey could have faltered.
Thus, when I didn’t find her at the pass, I began to worry. Though she was a competent downhill skier, she had little experience with cross-country skiing. Moreover, the thin air would be hard for her to breathe since she lived at sea level. I imagined her pack, made heavier by the weight of small gifts for me.
I finally saw her from a distance, a small dark figure against the white landscape, burdened by her pack, her body tilted to one side with exhaustion. I thrust my skis into high gear and glided toward her, and soon our skis and poles were tangled in a warm embrace. She was drop-dead tired and relieved to see me. I carried her pack to the cabin and we spent a cozy evening together, warming our toes in front of the wood stove and drinking hot chocolate made from melted snow.
As with every mother and daughter, we were both alike and different. We both loved the mountains and all that Nature had to offer, especially in summer, especially in the Pacific Northwest where she and my father had raised me. We both liked huckleberries for eating, mountains for climbing, and chilly lakes for diving into at the end of a sweaty day. Yet our views of life were diametrically opposed: my mother was a Christian, whereas I was—and still am—an agnostic. My mother wasn’t a Christian in name only—she lived and breathed the essence of Christianity in every moment of every day. In Nature, she saw God’s creations. In her personal life, she saw God’s hand in everything that happened. Likewise, I wasn’t just an agnostic—I was a scientist. In Nature, I appreciated the way the Earth and all living things were forever changing through the passing of eons and the influence of natural selection and random mutations. In the trajectory of my personal life, I gave both credit and blame to my own decisions, coupled with dumb luck. My mom studied the Bible—the Psalms, the life of Christ, and the writings of Paul. I studied the works of major evolutionists—Charles Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins.
When we zipped down to Tuolumne Meadows on our skis the next day, I could hear her singing How Great Thou Art, praising God for “all the worlds Thy Hands have made.” We stopped for a break and she thanked God for the abundant sunshine on that February day. I sighed with exasperation. California was dry as a bone, and another cloudless day was not what the Central Valley needed. California was in the throes of a dry spell that rivaled the 1934 Dustbowl Drought as one of the most severe in the state’s history. From the radio in our cabin, I knew that reservoirs were low and water was being rationed, and yet my mother was praising the Lord for another rainless day. As we sat on a patch of bare asphalt that should have been covered with three feet of snow, I explained that for many people, the sunshine was unwelcome. She saw otherwise. God loved her personally and had intentionally blessed her ski trip with the finest weather.
Our differences in religion and philosophy frequently butted heads like Sierra Nevada bighorn rams. I recalled the previous summer when we sat eating lunch at Olmstead Point in Yosemite’s high country. Directly in front of us, nearly blocking the view of a granite peak, was a cube-shaped boulder the size of a twelve-foot travel trailer, balanced impossibly on one edge. Similar boulders of smaller mass lay scattered atop the smooth, granite shelf where we sat. They seemed blatantly out of place, like abandoned refrigerators on a golfing green.
“Those are glacial erratics,” I said. “They were carried here 12,000 years ago by a sheet of ice on its way south and were dropped off when the glacier melted back at the end of the ice age.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Mom said. “Why do you need a story like that? God placed those boulders here, plain and simple.” We sat in silence for a moment, munching our crackers and cheese. I was forming my next argument, but she beat me to it.
“God created Adam and Eve as adults. If God has the power to create mature humans, why couldn’t he create a mature world, with eroded hillsides, old fossils and strange boulders like these? God is the ultimate Creator, and there is no limit to his creativity.”
“Well, I prefer to understand what actually took place. I find the history of Earth amazing and exciting. The more I learn, the more I appreciate all that I see.” I chomped into an apple with unnecessary force.
My mother and father were both mountaineers, always striking off with ice axes and ropes to ascend one of the many summits of the Pacific Northwest. Between the Cascade Range and the Olympic Mountains, there was a peak to summit nearly every weekend. All five of us children cut our teeth on climbing ropes and joined the ascents as we grew older.
I had no idea how much of my parents’ adventuring was initiated by my mother until my father died. She was only forty-eight at the time and never remarried. Dad’s death catapulted her into an orbit of freedom that spun her around the world several times over the next quarter century: China, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Germany, Egypt, Hawaii, and all across the continent of North America, again and again. When she stayed home, she climbed two peaks a week, one on Wednesday and the other on Saturday. The only thing that ever interrupted her mountaineering schedule was an international trip.
She embraced adventure in spite of countless ways that her body tried to fail her. Breast cancer threatened her life in her forties, and her mastectomy scars were a life-long reminder of that close call. She ascended trails with a wheeze and descended on contorted, arthritic feet. She suffered from scoliosis, infections, shingles, partial loss of hearing, and an enlarged heart. Yet she continued to adventure her way across the globe, often sleeping upright in a chair in her hotel room when a bout of asthma would not let her lay prone.
In her seventy-sixth year, I took her on a car-camping trip through the Navajo Nation. By then, her scoliosis was so severe that she spent most of the time in the sedan, admiring the high desert landscape through the window. Still, she insisted on sleeping in a tent—on a one-inch foam pad—in order to be close to Nature and to hear the birds at dawn. She wanted to see the Betatakin Ruins, an ancient stone village perched under a sweeping arc of sandstone, and was disappointed to learn that a view of the ruins required a half-mile walk. “Find out if they have a wheelchair,” she insisted. “The path is paved—we can do this.”
In less than fifteen minutes, she was in a National Park Service wheelchair, and we were headed down the trail. The paved path was flat for only a hundred yards before the descent began. If the chair had brakes, I couldn’t find them. Mom happily pointed out wildflowers and lizards while I strained to keep the wheelchair under control. She was ecstatic; I was terrified.
“Mom, this won’t work. I can’t hold the chair back any longer. Can you walk?”
She struggled to her feet, abandoned the chair, and shuffled the last fifty yards to an overlook where we finally saw the magnificent ruins across the canyon. Together we admired the creamy stone dwellings that were sheltered under the graceful curve of the colossal sandstone arch. Sections of old ladders still connected lower and upper tiers of the seven hundred-year-old dwellings, as though the ancestral Puebloan families who built this village might return at any moment.
When it came time to return to the Visitor’s Center, Mom climbed aboard the chair. The air temperature had ramped up to the nineties. Turkey vultures soared above and lizards scurried below. With great effort, I attempted to push the chair uphill. I found the task nearly impossible, and asked her if she could try to walk. “All right, let me give it a try,” she said. “If I hang onto the chair for balance, I just might make it.” She did. I have a photo of my mother pushing her wheelchair up the steep hill, her arthritic hands gripping the handles, her scoliotic body listing to the left. She did it without complaint, as if it were the most natural way in the world to return from a pueblo ruin.
One year later, she endured eight hours of spinal fusion surgery to correct the curvature of her spine. She wanted to walk again—or maybe hike again, although she knew she would never climb a peak again. By the following winter, Mom felt healed, strong, and ready for another adventure. She called me with exciting news. “I’m headed for the Arctic Circle!” As she described her up-coming quest, my head spun. The plan was to begin the journey in a small town near Seattle and drive 1,300 miles through British Columbia and the Yukon Territory in a ten-passenger van with eight other people. This seemed like a journey for the young and spry, not for a woman pushing eighty.
No logic could dissuade her, though, so in March of 2001, she set out for the north country. Along the way, she filled a journal with colorful descriptions of boreal and arctic landscapes as well as descriptions of birds and mammals that had caught her eye. Yet woven between the lines of the happy traveler’s narrative were words and phrases that betrayed the presence of an unknown illness. Abdominal pain. Upset stomach. Nausea. Exhaustion.
A month after her return, I stood with three of my siblings in a semi-circle around our mother at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. Mom was in a wheelchair, her puffy face and sallow skin divulging the seriousness of her failing health. Seated in front of her was the oncologist, a lovely young woman with intelligent eyes and raven hair. The doctor’s entire attention was focused on the older woman, ready to impart to her, and to all of us, the necessary yet dreadful news of her prognosis. “Mrs. Devin, I have tough news for you. Your liver is riddled with tumors. It’s not liver cancer, but rather a cancer from elsewhere in your body that has reached your liver.” The doctor leaned forward and placed one hand on my mother’s knee. “Even if you were my own mother, I would not advise chemotherapy. The cancer is too advanced. The best treatment for you at this point is comfort care and a lot of love from your family.” The doctor looked at the four of us, standing like a wall of silent support around our mother.
“How long do I have to live?” My mom was never one to beat around the bush.
“A month, perhaps two.”
Afterwards, I remember standing at the passenger side of the car while my brother helped Mom into the front seat. Before lifting her legs into the car, Mom looked directly at each of us with a hopeful, even excited twinkle in her aging eyes. “I’ve never been a terminal cancer patient before,” she said. “This is my last great adventure.”
Once again, Mom knew exactly where she was going. This time, it was a destination she had been looking forward to all her life. As for me, the days of spiritual sparring with my mother were over. Faith had granted her a vaulting pole to leap over the hurdle of death into the afterlife, and I would not wrest that from her. As much as she loved the beauty of the Earth, she envisioned Heaven as even more glorious.
My own perception of eternal Life contrasted greatly with my mother’s, both at that moment and now. In my world view, life has been on Earth for around 3.5 billion years and might in fact, be eternal. Over the span of eons, the elements of Life have coalesced in myriad, glorious forms—like particles within a kaleidoscope that shift into multi-colored, geometric beauty. The peculiar assemblage of elements that currently comprise my body might have been dinosaurs, ancient ferns, lilies, shrimp, and algae, to name just a few. When I die, my molecules will be liberated to assemble into new shapes and beings—wondrous entities that I am unable to imagine. This is eternal Life: the perpetual recycling of Earth’s essence into new creations, an immortality that I am destined to share.
As I stood before my bright-eyed mother, though, it was her version of the afterlife that counted—not mine. Her Heaven was not one I fancied, but I resolved to accompany her on her Last Great Adventure as far as I could go. Mom’s journey took place in a convalescent center in her hometown, and I moved back into my childhood home, only a couple miles away. In spite of the circumstances, we found ways to be happy. I brought my guitar and entertained her with How Great Thou Art and other hymns. Friends and family dropped by daily, and Mom always found the energy to show off her pictures of the Arctic Circle. Every evening, Mom would wave good-bye as if for the last time. And every morning when I walked into her room to wake her, she seemed surprised and slightly disappointed. “What? I’m still here?”
Gradually, she grew weaker and spent more hours asleep than awake. Nevertheless, she remained positive in spirit. She amused herself with the comings and goings of nurses and aides, wanting to know whether or not they were married, had children, or went to church. I caught her flirting with a young male nurse and marveled at the tenacity of human attraction, even near the hour of death.
I remember waking one morning and knowing it would be her last. She had been extremely weak for several days, and her body was shutting down. I rushed to her room and found her grandson already at her side, holding her hand. I pulled up a chair on the opposite side of the bed and held her other hand. We sat that way for over an hour, the three of us connected by loving hands. I want to have a death like this, I thought. Surrounded by love and filled with peace. My mother stirred gently and moaned. “You’re almost there, Mom,” I said. “You’re almost at the summit. Just a few more steps!” I felt like a midwife in reverse, helping another person pass out of life instead of into it. That the person I assisted was my own mother, the person who had brought me into life, brought sacred significance to my actions. I cherished every minute as her body slowly faded. Her death, when it came, was enveloped in beauty and wonder, like all of her adventures.
Mom’s anticipation of the afterlife made it almost impossible to mourn her passing. I felt almost dizzy with rapture, knowing she had achieved her ultimate goal. If anyone had lived life to the fullest, it was my mother. She had no regrets and no unfinished business. There had been plenty of time to say good-bye, and she was genuinely joyous about where she was going. I shared her euphoria, if not her faith. I marveled at this—my ability to vicariously feel elated about Heaven, even though I didn’t believe it existed. Perhaps it was like being happy for a friend who is leaving for Tunisia, even if Tunisia is at the bottom of your own personal bucket list. Whatever it was, I left my mother’s room to call my siblings, still enraptured by her Last Great Adventure which indeed, had been pretty great.
The glow from my mother’s passing eventually faded, leaving a nagging doubt. I began to wonder if I had diminished her joy by the very nature of my own beliefs. A specific memory began to haunt me, something that had occurred years after I had defected from Christianity. The event had taken place shortly after I had my first child. My mother had stressed the importance of raising children in a Christian environment. I had agreed in principal, but not in detail. “I plan to raise my children in a spiritual home, but not a Christian home,” I said.
Tears sprang to her eyes. “I know you’ve made a decision about your own afterlife, but it isn’t fair that you deny your daughter the gift of salvation.”
I watched her cry and I felt heartless. Though I ached to please her, I wasn’t willing to wear a mantle of faith that I didn’t own. Even for her, I couldn’t do that.
She turned from me, pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her eyes. “It’s not only about how you raise your children, it’s about eternity. If you don’t believe in God, you won’t go to Heaven. My granddaughter won’t go to Heaven, either.” I suddenly understood that her tears were not only for me and my infant daughter, but for herself as well. She was already imagining Heaven without us—an incomplete, sad Heaven.
Heaven could be sad? The contradiction in concept seized me. If Heaven could be less than perfect because it lacked some of your loved ones, then how could Heaven ever be a place of eternal bliss? Did God help you forget the ones who didn’t make it? The irrationality of these thoughts reinforced my agnostic convictions. I preferred to be recycled on Earth for eternity rather than be stuck in an imperfect Paradise. I gave my mother a long, silent hug. I felt her shoulders sag and her chest relax. “I’m sorry to make you cry, Mom. I love you. Let’s have some tea.”
After that tearful conversation so long ago, Mom never again mentioned my lack of faith. But now, I wondered what thoughts had crossed her mind during those final days at the convalescent center. While I sat there, holding her hand, was she silently praying for my salvation so that I might join her in Paradise? An answer came years later in the form of a handwritten poem Mom had composed the summer before her Arctic Circle journey. I had tucked it into one of her photo albums where it had resided for over a decade, almost forgotten. When I pulled the album off the shelf, a slip of paper fell to the floor. I sat down to read her words.
I will be in the morning dew that moistens your boots as you walk the trail
I will fascinate you from the diamond center of every lupine leaf.
The grasses, heavy with moisture, will nod as you pass by.
As the sun rises, it will kiss your face— and mine—with warm rays
And birds and small mammals will provide you with wonderment of the new day.
As you stop to drink from the meadow brook
I will be satisfying my thirst with you.
The flowers will become a bouquet to delight you
And I will be there to share it with you.
The back of my neck felt oddly warm, as though Mom were standing behind me, looking over my shoulder, watching me read her words. The breath of her presence enveloped me, and I knew she had found peace with our differences before she died. Though she wouldn’t find me in Heaven, she planned to meet me halfway on that common ground we shared—the world of beauty and nature. This was a meeting place I could live with—or rather, die with, and I gave the poem a nod of affirmation. I feel her near me as I hike trails lined with wildflowers, and I’m aware of her voice when the wind sings a hymn. But now, when my days in this body have ended, I know she will be with me as we join, separate, and reassemble in the perpetual renewal of Life.
