When I heard that Johnny Depp had curated blasting Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes from a rocket launcher, I was, quite frankly, underwhelmed. Granted, the drama did celebrate Thompson’s outlaw gonzo spirit. Depp had commissioned the erection of a phallic looking rocket launcher topped by a double-thumbed fist. Fellow bad boys Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn were among the guests; Lyle Lovett and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band played and sang; there were fireworks and I expect liquor and drugs flowed freely. Still, I shrugged. Fully ten years before Depp’s carefully curated spectacle, my family had blasted our dad’s ashes into eternity. With an old shotgun, from the side of a mountain at sunset. For a lot less than the $3 million that Depp shelled out.
Dad’s death at eighty-two came a decade after a stroke that left him speechless and increasingly frail. We knew that he wanted his body to be cremated, but he left no instructions about what he wanted done with his “cremains,” a word I find slightly cringy.
A plan emerged, masterminded by my older brother. R reminded us that he had Dad’s shotgun, though we were pretty sure that shotgun had never actually killed anything living. Our doctor dad was no hunter, but he loved a good adventure. R’s willingness to take on the intimate task of emptying buckshot out of shotgun shells and reloading them with Dad’s ashes, having first sifted out the bone fragments, was a big surprise, since he is a proud, card-carrying Catholic who plays by all the Catholic rules. I knew that cremation for Catholics only grudgingly allowed after Vatican II. So mad love for my brother to not find this sacrilegious.
Spiritually, we are a mixed bunch. Our oldest sister is a flamboyant eccentric who teaches sacred circle dancing and is the founding mother of a madcap neo-pagan Dance Camp in west Wales that meets each summer for two weeks of utopian dancing, ritual, and nudity. Our younger brother, L, is a judge, a disciplined seeker of justice and enlightenment, a black belt in judo, a committed long-distance runner. Me? I tell people I’m not only a lapsed Catholic, I’m collapsed. Somewhat floundering spiritually, drawn to Buddhist teaching and poetry. For me, it’s enough to know that we all come from stardust and return to stardust.
My siblings live spread out over three continents—in Canada, the UK and Africa—but a couple of summers after Dad’s death, we arranged to meet in Alberta. Instinctively, each of us knew where exactly the blast-off needed to happen.
Flashback to April 1961. Being a family doctor in a small town meant the only way for Dad to catch a break was to get out of Dodge. Easter was early that year I turned ten, winter unwelcome as an over-stayed relative. Never mind. Dad hooked up the Scamper holiday trailer to our new Pontiac Parisienne, and we headed west for a camping weekend in the Eastern slopes of the Rockies, following the rough spiral of the Forestry Trunk Road over Corkscrew Mountain, destined for the campground in the Seven Mile Flats valley.
Crammed in the back seat between my two brothers’ jabbing elbows, we knew enough to shut up as Dad, a famously terrible driver, navigated the winter-ravaged gravel road. Just as he rounded an icy hairpin turn, the car skidded, fishtailing vertiginously on black ice. To our right, a craggy, dynamite-blasted mountain side; to our left, a terrifying chasm and sure death.
We hit the mountain. Hard.
Shaken, we realized we were undead. Slightly bruised, but unbroken. Exhale.
The Scamper was smushed into the rocks; the Parisienne, like her elegant French namesake, had escaped relatively unscathed, still hitched to the trailer. Long before cell phones, no help was coming any time soon.
Somehow Mom managed to squeeze between the rocks and the camper and pry open the badly dented trailer door. And to her everlasting credit, fuelled by her French joie de vivre and foundational resilience, Mom ferried a card table and folding chairs out of the bashed-in trailer and instructed us to set it up on the tiny layby on the other side of the road. Then she handed out the pre-cooked turkey, bottles of red wine and lemonade, some buns and salads. It was clear we weren’t going anywhere soon and we had to eat. And as the cool evening drew in and stars emerged, we had a meal at the edge of the cliff, at the edge of our lives.
Memory fails to retrieve a clear story of how we got home, but we did. And now, decades later, here we were again, gathered at sunset on a late August evening, at the exact spot our family had narrowly escaped death some thirty years before, overlooking the huge valley where three rivers confluence: the Ram, Red Deer and Clearwater. As the sun slanted low, light turned the rivers golden.
“It looks like God’s open heart spread out before us,” said our sister, rearranging her voluminous caftan.
“Is this even legal?” a grandson asked, suddenly nervous.
“No,” I said, “but I doubt we’re going to get busted by Ranger Rick out here.”
Our sister, first born, sang an ancient hymn which called out for our hummed harmonies. But when she invoked God our Mother, I felt R’s entire body clench like he was stifling a rib-cracking sneeze. He managed to unclench to read the parable of the prodigal son—Dad being the errant son now reunited, intact presumably in spite of cremation, with God the Father. Our sister just smiled seraphically. I read my poem about locating Dad’s spirit in the Aries constellation—the Ram, his birth sign. Our eldest daughter, seventeen, said that though she wasn’t close to her grandfather, she felt she knew him through the many stories we tell about him. The man inspired stories.
And then it was time. Dad’s children and the elder grandkids, we each took turns firing Dad from his old shotgun. The only time I’ve pulled a trigger, ever. The force knocked me flat on my back, an upended turtle, our collective laughter melding with layers of undulating sound, a rippling fade out into the hills, the sky, into eternity.
We camped that night in the valley, drinking and telling stories around the campfire, laughing a lot. We agreed, one-hundred percent, that Dad would have absolutely delighted to go out with such a bang. That it would have answered his rallying cry whenever he proposed a plunge into an icy lake, or a trek up a mountain, or drive through a blizzard to see an opera in the city: “Let’s push things to the full!” he’d shout gleefully, as if we were the Light Brigade needing a bracing pep talk.
With a bang, Dad. With a bang.
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Jannie Edwards lives in Alberta, Canada, which has been called the Texas of Canada for good reasons–oil, cowboys, big trucks, racism. In spite of being an insomniac, she’s trying her best to stay woke.