Soon after he learned he was dying, my father told me that he loved the autumn light. So I kept sending photos: yellow aspens glowing in dark forests; alpine meadows turned to incandescent ochre; rays of sun mirroring off polished cliffs; glacial lakes glittering, blue-gold, green-gold, in soft wind.
On photo-taking ventures for him in the Rocky Mountains, I felt, keenly, how the autumn light burned brightest just before it vanished behind higher peaks to the West. There was no sunset, only that brief flare fading into ashen shadows, only reflections of pink across far eastern plains. Still, it was a light so intense it seemed more alive than anything else, leaving room for nothing except an awareness of its presence, for an emotion without a name, beyond suffering or joy. I wanted to communicate all this to him: that this light existed and that it meant something beyond words or death.
I stopped to take another picture in mid-October, minutes before I learned that he had died. I’d just returned to work in Boulder, Colorado, after a two-week visit at his New Orleans home. That day, I was still planning another, longer visit to him in early November. I was driving to Golden on State Highway 93, and I’d pulled over to capture an image of grasslands sunburnt red and gold, of dark-blue mountains silhouetted against rainless clouds. Another one for Dad, I thought, though the beauty stirred unease. The land was bone dry, wildfire dry. Â
As I drove on, my cell phone rang. The golden light dazzled my windshield while my stepmother told me he was gone.
A small urn now sits above my desk. But whenever I approach that stretch of the road and the sun strikes the meadows, a strange hope arises, though my father is only memory and ashes, though the West continues to burn. The autumn light returns, each year, undimmed: I am visiting the last place where I was during the last moments when I believed that he was still alive.
