Ashes to Ocean Ocean to Dust

About 10 or so years ago, I met a good friend through a former friend.

Beverly Williams became my sister-in-love through a series of utterly hurtful actions that were meant to harm rather than help me. Yet, only God can turn sour lemons into the sweetest lemonade.

Beverly and her husband, Gerald, had a respect for humanity that too many people are incapable of. Just like they "could have been" serial killers to me, I "could have been" a serial killer to them -- but the three of us shot a blue moon into the four winds and prayed for the best more than 10 years ago; we never looked back.

Beverly received her diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer just a little more than six months before she took her last breath during the first week of April of 2020. Unfortunately, due to Trump's COVID-19 Crisis of 2020, a month went by before she was cremated and then nearly another two months before we could say goodbye once and for all.

A small six-person tour said our goodbyes in the way she requested ... with her ashes scattered at a certain latitude and longitude beneath the East Bay bridge in San Francisco.

Beverly was born in the eastern United States, but she lived and died in the west and that is where she wanted to stay.

She lived a life where she wanted to be heard and we laughed hard about how she would always say “You people never listen to me".

Funny thing about Bev, when everyone would stop talking and say "What do you want to say?" she would stop talking, flip her hand the other way, and say "Oh...nothing."

We heard what Beverly had to say on a regular basis, she talked a lot - about every subject under the sun. We listened, we heard, but never let it be said that people who listen and hear don’t always heed.

I never thought I'd see the day when she would lay moaning and groaning in severe pain, barely coherent, pulling at her tubes and face mask saying she was "ready to go home and see Jesus," but that day came. I hurt like hell for her. It was barely five years prior that she had stood by my bedside in southern Cali -the deserts of Apple Valley- during a particularly bad round of Stevens-Johnson syndrome. My skin was melting off my body and I had a temperature so high that I was self-combusting from the inside out, but there she was trying to figure out what to do in the event that I didn't make it.

According to the doctors, I wasn’t supposed to make it, but God had other plans for me and I eventually returned to Georgia.

I didn't see this day coming. However, I am grateful to have been able to fly back out to California to say goodbye to her before she died.

Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay

"Sittin' in the evening sun, I'll be sittin' til the evening's done...watching the ships roll in and then I watch them roll away again..."

When I returned to say goodbye for the last time, I had to have my nephew drive me. I was in no condition to fly to California, especially with all the coronavirus and my own specific respiratory health problems.

It was a long ride, but worth every moment as we celebrated Beverly all the way out and through the nation, brought her 70+ years of life to a desired and expected end, and then celebrated her life all the way back to Georgia, headed from the Frisco Bay.

This photo captures every bit of the excellence of the life she lived in all of its different flavors, colors, and textures ... a fourth brown and dry, a fourth green and grassy, a fourth sandy and stuck somewhere between this over-bloated gosh awful world and stupendous glorious freedom, and a forth rocky, piled up, and uncertain-with gentle calculated billowing waves and a small frigate and dinghy rolling by on the seashore of her deepest desires unfulfilled.

She loved art and music and beaches and calm waters, so this picture- shuttered in complete perfection- would have made her smile.

And I know that she would say "It would be just like you people not to listen to me until I'm dead. I must say back "Well, we are listening now."

You are finally free.

-30-

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