On Ancestors and Remembrances

 Marcus Alden Meredith

October 30, 2024

On Ancestors and Remembrances

The Annual Golden Gate Bridge Walk

It’s October 30th and 13 years ago I watched my mother die. It was a quiet passing…but the color of her face and skin and the stiffness of her body was not something I was going to forget. I was still a teacher and I went to work the next day. My friends and colleagues kept asking about my state of mind with some concern but what was I going to do? I lived by myself. Staying at home would just have seen me playing sad songs on the piano as the walls closed in. Work kept me occupied at least. I spent more time with my dad as the years went on but in the immediate aftermath of her passing I just wanted to keep on keeping on. Looking back now, it seems both profound and yet mundane at the same time, a contradiction at the least, how my mother’s end was so emotional and yet so inevitable and … ordinary.

Later, as the months slipped by into the embrace of the past, I noticed something: it was getting harder to remember mom’s voice clearly. I could vividly recall her laugh and her mezzo-soprano voice singing Christmas hymns like “O Holy Night” but just her everyday, moment-to-moment voice was slipping away. Time was having it’s way with my memories, eroding them like a stream wears away at its banks as it meanders more and more. With this happening and me realizing what was escaping my mental grasp, hit me hard again many years later while watching an episode of Game of Thrones. Sir Davos states it clearly saying, “nothing fucks you over more than time.” Harsh… but with the proverbial grain of truth attached. ‘Memento Mori’ the Stoics teach us, but I’d not yet learned that concept very well. I’d seen people die in front of me before, often quick,violent lives come to a quick, violent end… but mom’s was different. It’s not just that she was my mother, it was the way she had passed and the decay that came with it that seemed to stick to my thoughts like some mental black hole pulling my thoughts into it with its unrelenting gravity. That kind of force from the flow of Nature will invariably effect on the ebb and flow of our lives to come. I started to get back to working out, improved my orthodonture, gained weight… my mental-emotional retrorockets firing to stop the ruthlessly inevitable pull of time and endings. I also resolved to make some memorial tribute to her because if her beautiful, melodious, joyfully soprano was being rubbed out by the Juggernaut of Time and the Universe’s forward march then what would time rob from me?

The mortuary society my family belong’s to notified us a couple months later that they had scattered her ashes of the Golden Gate. “That’s it. Walk the Golden Gate Bridge and have a quiet, internal talk with mom,” I thought. Her passing had been so close to Halloween and Dia de lost Muertos it seemed perfect. For the family, the celtic traditions of Samhain (the New Year Fire Festival) clicked too for these were the original practices of remembering and praising the ancestors and seemed to be just begging for this kind of memorial. So it was settled: I’d take off from work to walk The Bridge October 30th of every year and thus was born The Meredith Golden Gate Memorial Walk.

The past 13 years have been a time of tremendous change for me and frankly the whole world as well. Think back for a moment, people: the rise of social media and streaming, climate change coming home to roost in our lives and bite us in the ass, a global, viral pandemic with millions of lives lost, and so on. I think that Americans views of the world and where they are at this moment in time are still reeling from the PTSD of COVID and the aftermath on our economy and our lives. In all that time, my yearly touchstone has been walking to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge and having that mental chat with mom. Only, now it’s mom and dad. I put on my hoodie or a Pea Coat (sometimes both!), drop Air Pods into my ears, find the right playlist, and remember two great parents who helped me to become who I am, or at least gave me the start. This just helps to reinforce the need for my personal memorial to them, to “the ancestors.”

Talking with my friends, it has also been an event that helps me realize just how lucky, how fortunate I am especially when I hear my friends recount their families and parents. The parent-child relationship is as fraught as the sailing of a tall ship in the days of old, but seemingly just as necessary. We really must remember that we wouldn’t be here without them, complete with all their faults and foibles, their graces and shortcomings, the past made us all who we are and set us in the direction toward the future. Where we sail in life from this point on, well, that’s up to us. But, at the risk of straining the metaphor, for some you need to discard the old maps and find your own way, develop your own private GPS of life. At least for me, walking The Bridge never fails to remind me of the Old Norse funeral prayer from The 13th Warrior: 

“Lo there! do I see my fathers.

Lo there! do I see my mother and my sisters and my brothers.

Lo there! do I see the line of my people, back to the time of the Beginning!

Lo! They do call to me!

They bid me take my place amongst them.

In the Halls of Valhalla!

Where the brave may live, forever.”