1. Cycle of Life
by Loren Herrigstad
© 2014 Loren A Herrigstad. All rights reserved.
I thought of many things as I gently poured the ashes of my best friend into
the mountain stream that flowed beneath the wooden footbridge I stood on.
Strangely though, the thing I was feeling most was a sense of completion,
even the resumption and continuance of a never-ending cycle.
The creek I was scattering the remains into would become the ocean that lay
beyond the widening blue fjord before me. That ocean in turn would
evaporate into the grey clouds above. Those clouds would then condense
and fall upon the earth as rain or snow, mixing with the soil to become the
plants and eventually flesh that comprised my body, and had hers as well.
Now I was simply returning what my friend had been borrowing in this
world, allowing the cycle to continue. I gently wept though, wondering who
would return me to this endless process, to life’s river. When it had come to
children, that cycle had been interrupted for my wife and I.
Standing on that small bridge, I seemed alone in the world now. A drop
seemingly apart from life’s teeming ocean it was naturally drawn to.
I felt something brush my head however, and then my cheek.
Fresh drops of rain from the sky above. The cycle hadn’t forgotten me. I was
still included.
“Pour on me,” I sniffed, looking up. “Pour on me good, Rain.”

2. Cycle of Life 2
Rain. That was my favourite word. Had been for forty years, because it was
my wife’s name. In her final earthly moments as her body was failing her,
she had quietly pledged, “Every time it rains, I will be touching you.”
She was just keeping her promise now.
I simply turned, tucking that empty urn under my arm for return to the
funeral home and further reuse in its own cycle of bearing death towards
new life. The rain was falling lightly upon me, its small drops almost
caressing my head. Her touch had always been that way.
I left that footbridge with a smile on my face, and a feeling of love, and life,
within my heart that, like most natural cycles, was without end.