I am in Toronto.
The place where I was born and grew up.
With my twin we travelled to the place we once called home.
In the nearby valley were our youths were spent exploring the forest paths we laid to rest the remaining ashes of our parents. Into the creek it flowed and outwards into Lake Ontario and onwards to the Atlantic and onwards to the Atlantic.
This occasion marked the end of their journey and my own journey of saying goodbye. Earlier in the year I arranged the box of our parents ashes to be buried in the Magro plot with memorials placed not only of my parents but of my grandmother on my mother’s side which was never made for her when she passed away in 2010. Since my brothers were not present we met up in France and in the remote countryside we laid to rest some of the ashes in the soil under a baby apple tree. I’ve as well spread a portion of the ashes into the shores of our ancestral home in a surreal experience I will never forget.

Mark M.