What does it mean to have a memorial stone? For so many, it means there is a dedicated place where you can honor and visit your loved one. My father’s gravestone is about fifteen feet within one section of the expansive perimeter walkway of Phoenix’s National Memorial Cemetery. My children and I have painted rocks and planted pennies there. I’ve imagined his body underneath the hot dirt, at rest, quieted, and made holy. I’ve commiserated with him when the Arizona temperatures were only comfortable for the deceased. I’ve shed many tears knowing he was right there, out of reach. I’ve also enjoyed wandering the rows and visiting with people I never would have known. 

One of the many ways I was being prepared for Clinton’s passing occurred during a conversation he and I had just a few weeks before this day, three years ago. Clinton loved the outdoors and saw vacant land as even more hallowed than the space a person’s body would occupy in the ground. Our conversation was a short and pleasant agreement about cremation. I don’t even remember why we were talking about it–it very well could have been a subject at the forefront of our minds because of my father’s recent passing. I can see now the many ways my father’s death helped to equip us, and I don’t believe the timing to be coincidental. It is no surprise to me that my father tried to provide for and protect me from his life beyond that place in the ground. I know my children feel the same continuation of love and devotion from their own dad. 

After Clinton was cremated, his father approached me about having a headstone for him at their family’s burial ground in rural Mississippi. Just a few years prior, we all stood within that cemetery’s bounds, and I recorded my father-in-law speaking mostly about his parents, and then about the other relatives buried there. He weaved in and out of the rows, reciting a rich history of every name presented, beautifully and boldly engraved. I remember it being a warm, sunlit day, and it sparked in me a love for the life found in cemeteries. I carry that still.  

I was so focused on honoring the cremation I was certain Clinton wanted, that I never even considered a permanent marker in a cemetery. I imagined we would keep Clinton’s ashes with us–a part of him we would slowly release in some of his favorite places as the years passed. My family placed a bench and a plaque with Clinton’s name near some of his favorite soccer fields; we visit when we’re in the area, and sometimes I go alone. Still, the idea of a headstone in a cemetery among the good company of celebrated lives feels different. 

Even before I understood what Mississippi would come to mean to me, it had already found its way into my life. I’m guessing we’ve all learned that little chant in elementary school about how to properly spell Mississippi. I learned it quickly and was eager to share with everyone I knew. In college, I took second place in the annual spelling bee–my greatest claim to fame that no doubt sprang from the satisfaction of knowing how to spell Mississippi before second grade. I received a family-sized Hershey bar as a runner-up for my linguistic knowledge, yet the reward felt incidental. Somewhere in me, a connection to that part of the South had been softly forming—one that truly came alive when Clinton moved next door to me in 2001.

How do you decide whether or not your name should accompany that of your late husband, gone at 50 years old, beautifully and boldly engraved on a headstone at an honored family cemetery in Mississippi? Would it not undo me, to see my name there, alongside the husband and father with whom I chose to weave my life? My family is mostly from the northeast, and when my parents moved to Wyoming when I was a teen, I knew right away that Wyoming was where I wanted my ashes spread. I never even thought about a permanent place to mark my presence in history, and for my loved ones to visit. 

I said yes to my name resting beside Clinton’s. In a world that has always been shaped by uncertainty and constant change, we made history together. We will exist as forever linked in genealogy reports and in the breakdown of our children’s and grandchildren’s DNA. Our 20 years of marriage deserves a place in this world. When Clinton and I had the conversation about cremation just a few weeks before his passing, I didn’t know that I would feel this way.  

Some people say Americans don’t know how to die. I tend to agree. We authorize every measure within reach to sustain lives that are no longer comfortable or meaningful, driven by our fear of saying goodbye. Cemeteries, however, show us something else entirely—the art of living. Shakespeare was stirring the pot when he asked, “What’s in a name?” After death, what remains is not the name itself but the presence of a soul—something felt everywhere, unbound by language. And yet, we know the story of Romeo and Juliet precisely because it has been named, written, told, and carried across generations. Cemeteries are those stories, and I can’t imagine a world without each of those names and perfectly-worded, abbreviated, proclamations of life. A cemetery is a place we go not only to honor the dead, but also to listen.

The week before our lives changed forever, we received the elusive blessing of a snow day. On the night of January 17, 2023, Clinton texted one of the last texts he would send that didn’t involve the business, the busyness of marriage, and having three active kids. 

Mama gets what she wants for her birthday, he said in a group text to our children and me: all of her kids home for the day!

He was right, it really was all I had grown to want in the years leading up to his death. The life of sports and work consumed us. I needed it to slow down; I needed us to slow down, and we were picking up speed at an exponential rate. I felt that our family needed to pause and give time to what was quietly sustaining us. 

My family thrived on the sensory feedback of an active, busy, and noisy world. Many times over the course of our marriage, Clinton would ask me, in response to my desire for a slower pace, “Well, what do YOU want?”

And typically, I would think about it for a long moment, trying to find the right words for what I wanted–it was an unreachable desire, not realistic for any of us. The life we were living in was the world we knew, and it was also the same life everyone around us was living. Our life is what we know, and what we know becomes our life.

How could I explain that all I wanted was for us to sit on the couch and watch a movie together? I wanted us to laugh and connect. I wanted us to be bored. No one wants to repeat the scary and uncertain thorns that COVID pricked into the preoccupied regularity of our lives. However, I loved COVID for what it gave to our family: bonfires, storytelling, cooking together, and reading. The kids were bored–something they had never felt. But then, they built things and adventured; they created and played games around the table. We connected outside of work, school, and sports, and that part was nice for me. 

So, when I unexpectedly became a widow at 46, I sent one child to college, and I now have two more with their feet out the door. My desire to be together as a family is still a large portion of what I want in life, but at what point do we really stop and ask ourselves what do I want, and who am I?

This is not just the pressing question of widowhood, although becoming a single parent through loss has forced this question–and the possibilities an answer would embrace–to sit brightly on the surface of a murky pond. This is bigger than resolutions or buying a gym membership each year when January rolls around. It’s not about publishing that novel, doing well on a test, or tackling that backyard project. The answer isn’t in money or moving through people who stand in the way. It’s not in being selfish either– so many of us are told to start being a little bit more selfish and to say “no” more when life is being lived less for you. The answer isn’t found in excuses, either: I can’t leave my current situation because of this or that. Or, I can’t just up and fulfill the calling of my heart’s desire because that would require a lot of money. There are insurmountable situations that place us exactly where we are without the options to act. So what do we do?

I have thought a lot over the last three years about the answer to the question of what I want. Other than the basics of what we all desire: world peace, health, happiness, a meaningful life for ourselves and those we love, there is the yearning found in too many of my favorite songs to pick just one. There is that sacrosanct, hard-to-access part of myself that oftentimes finds it easier to stop trying. It takes little effort to let that part of me stay precisely where it is, so that I can go about the business and the busyness of life.

There is only one answer that holds after denouncing the notion of resolutions each time a new year rises. There is only one person who knows me better than I know myself and who asks me to lean in and listen when stillness and togetherness are the only desires I can name. Growing closer to Him is a daily resolution where access works both ways. It is a commitment to create stillness and to listen every day – to stop trying to find the answer on my own, and to change the question from ‘me’ to ‘Him’. What does He want, and what does He want for me? Those of us who are left behind after loss, the ending of a relationship, or children leaving home, can often forget that we are not alone as we try to forge ahead into territory that is unknown.

Clinton and I were planning lots of things. The day he passed, we talked about what retirement would look like. We teased our youngest about being stuck with us inside a sprinter van while we drove around to every national park; the older two pretended to be relieved that they would be out of the house by then, but it was going to be epic, we promised him. Your sister and brother will be sad that they missed out, just you wait and see. 

We talked about buying land somewhere, building a cabin away from the daily grind of work and suburban life. We talked about our next journey–a vacation in a place we’ve always wanted to go. Costa Rica was high on our list, but Scotland–Scotland was number one. 

We bought Rick Steves’ book on Scotland and had the kids look through and make a list of places they wanted to see. We made our own contributions to the list and were just waiting for the right time to buy our tickets. We kept saying, After Christmas, we’ll jump in with both feet. After Christmas.

God had a different plan for all of us after Christmas, and I still like to think this plan included setting Clinton free from a future that might have been marked by a lot of suffering. God’s plan was to freeze the father of our children in time; Clinton would forever be 50, and magnificent. After watching my own father suffer, there is the unfavorable and backward blessing of dying young. 

I also thought about the concept of Heaven, and the omnipresence of Clinton’s spirit. I was, and I am sure that Clinton will always be with us in some form, but I couldn’t shake the notion that we still needed to go to Scotland, and that I needed to bring Clinton with us. I latched onto the idea of spreading some of Clinton’s ashes in the place we had dreamed of visiting. Four tickets to Edinburgh later, a dear friend of mine helped me to plan our trip through the Highlands.

My sister and I did an unguided bike tour of Ireland while we were in our twenties. I will never forget the image of her flying down a hill, dispersing a herd of sheep in the road with her legs extended, and both of us laughing as we’d never laughed before. With that adventure in mind, my friend found a company in Scotland that would rent us bikes to complete The Great Glen Way. The plan was to bike through the Scottish Highlands for three days and spend some time in Edinburgh, Fort William, Inverness, and several other small towns along the way. I packed Clinton’s ashes, imagining that the right spot or spots would hit all of us at once somewhere, or multiple places along the journey. We would release a part of Clinton there forever, commemorating our coming together as a new family unit in his absence. We would give him a place about which all of us had dreamed, to rest. The rich earth of our ancestors would welcome him. 

The Great Glen Way was not easy. With no resentment whatsoever, I’ll admit that my teenage travelling companions thought it a lot more manageable than I. That being said, I am of the opinion that The Great Glen Way is meant to be navigated with an electric mountain bike or on foot. To this day, nothing has tasted as good as, or gone down as quickly as, the chicken coronation sandwich and chips I had on our longest, second day of travel. The kids and I loved every misty, magical, mountainous mile we rode, and I would do it all over again in a second.

Just like any adventure, however, there were a few moments that tested the new family unit we were becoming. After a long, gradual hill on day one, we faced a late-morning decision: do we take the high or the low road? Both would get us to our destination, and both would undoubtedly be scenic. Whatever we did, I determined, we needed to do it together. 

My youngest frowned upon the group’s decision and began to climb the long hill in the opposite direction. Before we knew it, he was out of sight, and we were turning around, exhausted. Not to be too dramatic, but my youngest child was biking alone somewhere in the Scottish Highlands while we played catch-up, not knowing where he was or how far he’d gone. 

Some smiling locals sat out on their porches, enjoying the glimpse of sun as we turned around, and as I yelled into the distance up the mountain, “I’m taking away your phone!” And then, “There will be consequences!” The mountains returned my voice with an echo into the scattered houses and the locals who smiled politely.

We climbed the long upward mile towards where I thought Byron had gone. When I reached the top, Walker and Cadie had already arrived, and Walker was bent over the ground, barely holding onto his bike. Had he gone up too fast and gotten sick? I looked at Cadie, who was recording her brother in the loving way that only sisters can when you are 18 months older than your younger, taller brother. Walker’s face writhed in pain while his sister continued to record. He was cramping, and there was nothing he could do but wait it out. Half an hour later, Byron was found, and we were all together and recovered. 

That afternoon, we encountered a beautiful waterfall, and I was reminded of the ashes on my back. The kids had just enjoyed ice cream from a cute little cottage at the base of the last climb of the day, and we counted the Scottish stags meandering around the green meadow and by an old castle nearby. The waterfall felt like a beautiful spot to release part of Clinton’s body. I mentioned it to the children right when two tourists drove up and walked over to where we stood. The ashes remained on my back, and we started biking again.

Day two delivered a different challenge with the same child, unfortunately. Following a beautiful night’s rest in a local castle with a fancy dinner and breakfast tucked away neatly underneath our biking spanx, we ventured through town and back onto the trail. Again, we climbed up an impossibly steep hill that took us through the woods, carpeted in clover and humus. There, we overlooked the Loch Ness and took a break. There was no one else on the trail, and Scotland felt like home. I had the urge to reach into my pack and release some of Clinton’s ashes. The sun came through the trees, and the air was clear over the spans of the Highlands in every direction. Just as the thought hit, however, the kids were back in their saddles, and Clinton stayed where he was: light on my back while my burning quads screamed trying to reach the faster portion of my crew. 

Just before we got into town that day, Byron flew down a road through the dreamy bucolic landscape of Scottish farms and horses, sheep, and cows. My daughter was behind him and saw him flip head over handlebars when he momentarily forgot that the brakes on Scottish mountain bikes are the reverse of what he was used to. There had been no cars on the road the entire time we rode except for that day. The little red car that came around the corner had to veer suddenly as Byron flew and landed. 

“He’s not okay,” my daughter pulled me aside when I finally arrived at the scene. 

“I’m fine,” he insisted. His helmet was intact, and he showed me the road rash on his leg and elbow. “I promise, I’m fine,” he assured me. The people in the car had gotten out before I arrived and had also felt him well enough for them to continue on. 

“He’s not okay,” my daughter kept telling me, “Be glad you didn’t see it.”

That night, we stayed in a bed and breakfast owned by a local nurse. She was attentive to Byron’s injuries and also felt like he would be fine. We shook our heads with gratitude and disbelief. No one speeds down an asphalt hill, flies over the handlebars, and then ends up being okay after landing the way my daughter described her younger brother landing. 

We finished our journey through the Highlands the next day, intact, but sore, and wholly complete as a little family unit without our missing person. Clinton’s ashes remained in my pack from beginning to end–a beautiful metaphor and reminder of his presence the entire time, and of his continuous presence still. 

  Despite the hundreds of breathtaking moments where we could see Clinton floating through the air and landing to join the lush earth, Clinton’s place will always be wherever we are.

There were three of us, and we were scattered no more than 100 yards apart on the side of a ridge. There, along the elk trail and the pungent odor of sagebrush dense and high in every direction, we searched for the bull elk that ran away just as the sun went down. In the distance, the last breath of light over the aspen trees met the bugle of an elk. It was bone-chilling and intangible.

It was dark as we searched. I heard my breath, louder than the others, and too warm to be a ghost in the air. The youngest one of our group, and the only other hunter besides myself, called from below. He found his elk. Flashlights on and weary-legged, our guide prepared the elk to return with us. Then, we hiked back to the ranch vehicle–a distance that seemed impossibly long compared to the trek we made earlier. Driving back, the arc of the moon unfolded over the lake, glossy and smooth on the prairie. Later, I would dream about the animals bedding down nearby, moving towards the water in concert, stilled and thirsty under the reflection of the sky.

That morning, we high-stepped over waist-high sage. My legs burned and caught in the chapped branches; my heart was pounding. The layers I wore were too much for the thickening air. An elk bugled close by; we watched for movement and listened for sound in the trees. Several cow elk, blonde and healthy from the summer and the grass, mingled out in the open. The bulls took cover in the trees, enigmatic and intentional. We waited.

Our guide started answering. He mimicked a cow elk expertly–it was obvious that his many years of guiding allowed his estrous mews and chirps to become second nature. The bull elk answered back, still somewhere in the depths of the woods. The back and forth continued for a while until the bull elk grew bored. We watched the woods and the meadow for a little bit longer, and then, as quietly as we could, we ducked back into the cover of wind and sage.

I discovered that when you are searching for elk, everything moves, sounds, and takes the shape of an elk. Especially in the golden hour of morning and night, shadows tease your eyes, and dusk overpopulates the imagination with the unreal. We glassed hillsides and plateaus, leaving no shadow neglected. Mule deer teased with their jumpy movements, and beef cows bellowed across the valley. We played Marco Polo with the sound of any bull elk in our vicinity, and we drew closer to where we could hear but not see. 

That night, I pictured myself shooting. Sometime between the wood stove dying down in our cozy, little room and my anxious alarm in the morning, I couldn’t yet conjure an image of myself doing what I was there to do. It seemed unfathomable that I could actually get an elk. And how would it feel? As we headed out again before sunrise, I still couldn’t pinpoint an answer, and I think that’s why I missed the first elk, at which I shot, just a couple of hours later. 

A tree fell in the forest after my shot, and we heard it. My guide and I were ninety percent sure that the bull elk that was standing with the cows on the side of a steep hill just seconds before had escaped, unscathed, over the ridge. But then something crashed. 

I gathered my legs to make the climb and followed the guide just to be sure. There was nothing. No sign of anything injured–only the mustard color of grounded leaves, and trees lying across each other like a giant game of pick-up-sticks. Gratitude comes with a missed shot and nothing wounded. I wasn’t holding the rifle tight to my shoulder, and I had jumped the gun, so to speak. That wasn’t my bull yet, and I think I knew it even as I pulled the trigger. The body follows the mind when we’re making a decision that our subconscious knows is not meant to be. I needed that reminder, and I needed that miss to be ready for what would come next.

Three O’Clock. We were out again after lunch at the lodge. The sun was dim with the promise of winter, and we crossed a new territory of familiar undulations only to arrive at another beautiful copse of Aspen. I felt something different that afternoon as I walked behind my guide, who moved lower to the ground and spotted movement in the trees. The pursuer of elk walks all paths of nature’s tidings, and in those several minutes before watching a group of cow elk emerge from the trees to feed, each path reminded me of why I was there. I thought about my mom, in my eyes one of the best women hunters outside of and within North America. She knew the immeasurable value in what I was doing and wanted the hunting legacy of her and my father to continue. I thought about Clinton. He was a soft prepper, always one to plan ahead when it came to ensuring that all of us would be okay should something ever happen. Our shelves in the basement were filled with canned goods, and he kept his finger on the details of the goings-on in the world. And when he wasn’t providing, Clinton was breathing in the clear air of the mountains in any way that he could. My father, a lifelong hunter, knew all too well the gifts of hunting, letting go, and getting out into a backcountry where the ground seldom saw the footsteps of man. Both Clinton and my dad worked hard so that they could have the freedom to spend a good portion of their lives doing more of what they loved. I didn’t know that I had been waiting for them to join me until I felt their presence that afternoon. I wanted to prove to myself that I could provide for my family in a way that felt innate and true to me, while stepping out into the beloved world of my late husband and dad. It is a beloved world for me, too, and I was ready.

The wind was in our face, and the low sun at our backs, as we left the grazing cow elk for different grounds. Something in me had shifted, and when we reached the ranch truck following what had become another afternoon hike, I didn’t feel the same fruitlessness as my guide. Instead, I carried the two men in my life who had left me too soon. I carried Clinton’s desire to provide for our children and me, and I felt the continuation of their lives with each footstep forward. 

We parked on the road and walked south. On the hillside, too far away for any viable harvesting, a large group of elk mingled and feasted on the late fall grass. A bugle, and then another bugle. Close to us. There were bulls in a herd close to us, and they were moving. The wind carried their scent in our direction, and my guide set up the sticks to shoot. I nervously rested my rifle and looked through the scope. A bull elk stood in my sights, but the shot wasn’t good enough yet. Cows shifted around him, and I tightened the gun to my shoulder.

“Shoot!” My guide whisper-yelled, and yet I waited, probably two to three more seconds, before the bull turned to face me. His neck and antlers were beautifully dark, and their color faded into his neck and torso, where his fur was lighter. I didn’t even feel the kick of the gun as I watched him go down immediately. No suffering.

When I walked towards the majestic animal, all I felt was gratitude. I thanked him for his life, and I continued to thank him silently as my guide field-dressed him and prepared him to come back with us. I’ve spent a good portion of my life knowing that hunting isn’t mean or cruel, but rather, an opportunity to see the wild and appreciate nature’s provision in a way that honors what this world has given.

It’s an experience of contradictions to love something so deeply right after you’ve ended its life, but hunting teaches us that life doesn’t end when a heart stops beating. I know this to be true because of who came to meet me out in the field that day. I can think of no other endeavor that humbles and strengthens the human spirit, and pays tribute to the living and the dead quite like hunting. And for this, I am grateful for the people before me who have planted this purpose in my life.