My Journey into Goodbye
Journey into Goodbye 7/16/26
I often think of my Dad—how we seemed to miss each other in conversations or scoffs at how the other moved through the world. We shared meaningful moments, though they were scattered: field outings in San Luis Obispo, Boy Scout weekends, and talks about my next choices. He did endorse my letting go of Ag Ed teaching as a career and my receiving a Master of Arts in Dramatic Art. We loved each other in an estranged way.
After my Dad’s passing, at the mortuary, the mortician opened my parents’ funeral and cremation file. Seeing their signatures startled me and brought back the same office twenty-five years earlier, after my mother died. My brothers and I chose an urn that would be engraved to honor him. My Dad’s agreement with his wife: his ashes were to be buried with her. I trusted they were kept safe; this was my first goodbye.
Then, fifteen years later, my step mother decided to release Dad’s ashes into the Pacific Ocean - there he would be near his brother who died in a plane crash coming home from WWII.
On the train to Oceanside to meet my brothers, Stepmother, and her granddaughter, I begin saying goodbye a second time. I feel unsettled, unsure how it will unfold. I want some of Dad’s ashes to share with my son and a personal way to say goodbye, while honoring my Stepmother’s choice of burial at sea. What once felt closed is opening again. We will send Dad into the Pacific and have one final moment with Gil.
I had imagined burial at sea as extraordinarily final: a casting of remains into the ocean, a letting go. Now, in San Diego, it is real as we board the boat, unsteady and reaching for anything to hold. The ashes are prepared in a galvanized bucket filled with rose petals. I receive a jar holding a small portion, and we move to the bow, facing the water. We speak to Gil, then gather at the railing. My Stepmother lowers the bucket and pulls the rope. With two tugs, the ashes enter the water, sink beneath the surface, and the rose petals float. The boat turns, and we move back through the petals.
Since my Dad’s passing, I reflect on DeWayne Everett Gilbert’s place in my life—our father-son challenges and moments of acknowledgment. Through therapy and conversations, I found some solace and acceptance. But planning the ash scattering changed that. I realized how little I knew about the man who was my father. Sometimes I still hear his voice or see him in my son’s stature, sound of his voice and his face. And, Dad had his way of finding antidotes to problems, requested or not, and those memories make me smile.
Two years later, my youngest brother will take his own life and a little over two years my younger brother will die of health complications leaving me as the sole survivor of five.
My Mom is another story.
