Elizabethtown
When Mom died in the spring of 2007, Dad was at a loss as to what to do with her ashes. Several months later, though, Mom’s brother suggested that Dad might place her ashes in a newly- constructed columbarium in the little rural church of Mom’s upbringing. Mom was laid to rest in the Church of the Redeemer in Ansted, West Virginia in the summer of 2008.
We were never sure that’s what Mom would have wanted. The debilitating disease that took her life hadn’t left room for that conversation. When Dad died in 2016, he, as we expected, wanted his remains to be with Mom.
Church of the Redeemer is a mission church in the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia that was founded in 1879. Mom’s great-great-grandfather, who died in 1897, is buried in the tiny Redeemer cemetery. Mom grew up in that church, only leaving Ansted after we moved away when she was twenty-four. The two oldest of us four brothers were baptized and went to Sunday school there. I attended first grade in Ansted.
Though the church is still operating, the congregation has dwindled to a handful. Services are held inside the church proper only on Easter and Christmas, other times in the Parish Hall. The electric bill for heating and cooling the church exceeds their budget.
A year or so ago, our clan made a collective decision to bring Mom and Dad back to California. Prior to moving to Grass Valley after Mom got sick, they had lived in Nipomo some thirty odd years. When Mom died, they had been living in California for going on fifty of her seventy-four years.
Nipomo was where they raised what we brothers call their “second family” — Jim and JD. In Nipomo they were surrounded by many of their beloved grandchildren, four of whom still live there. Mom and Dad attended services at St. Barnabas, an Episcopal church in nearby Arroyo Grande. Nipomo was their home. The family decided this is where Mom would want to be. And Dad would want to be with her. We worried about how much longer Church of the Redeemer would function.
A little over a year ago, my wife Debi and I made a trip to visit Debi’s family in Tennessee, taking a side trip to Ansted to retrieve Mom and Dad’s ashes. On our return trip to Tennessee, we stopped for lunch in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.
When we arrived back in Tennessee that afternoon, Debi’s niece’s husband, Shane, inquired about our trip. Debi told him that my parents’ ashes were in the car, that they were being taken to California, and that we had stopped for lunch in Elizabethtown. Shane’s surprised response was to ask if we had seen the movie Elizabethtown before running into the house excitedly telling his wife about where we had just been and what we were doing. Needless to say, Shane insisted we watch the movie.
The 2005 Cameron Crowe movie tells the tale of a young man named Drew (played by Orlando Bloom) who travels to Elizabethtown to retrieve the remains of his father, Mitch, and bring them back to the west coast. Drew’s father had died while visiting his Kentucky family (who, by the way, continued to insist that Drew’s family was in California, even though they had for many years lived in Oregon). Drew’s family had decided that his father should be cremated, something the Kentucky family opposed. Watch the movie to see the resolution.
The movie has an all-star cast: Kirsten Dunst (Drew’s love interest, Claire), Susan Sarandon (Drew’s mother, Hollie), Alec Baldwin (Drew’s Oregon boss patterned after Phil Knight, founder of Nike), and even Paula Dean (Drew’s ever-cooking Aunt Dora).
So yep, like Drew, we were taking parental ashes back to “California” — and we’d stopped in Elizabethtown. But the coincidences didn’t stop there.
Two scenes in the movie caused Debi and I to recall friends who had passed in recent years. In one scene, Drew’s cousin sported a “Rocking R” t-shirt, a moniker our departed friend Paul used to denote his home on Lake Travis near Austin. And in the scene depicting Mitch’s memorial, his cousin’s band played Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird. Freebird was the favorite song of another of our friends (coincidentally also named Paul) that was played at his memorial service.
Then there was Kirsten Dunst’s “Makers Mark” t-shirt. We’d passed the Makers Mark distillery on the road between Ansted and Elizabethtown. The previous night Debi and I had enjoyed a relaxing evening over a little wine and Makers Mark at a hotel in Huntington, West Virginia.
I have to admit to a bit of trepidation over undoing Dad’s decision and relocating the folks back to California. As weird as it seems, though, I took the movie Elizabethtown as a sign that we’d made the right decision.
