Like the Flowing River

The Funny Thing About Human Beings

A man asked my friend Jaime Cohen: 'What is the human being's funniest characteristic?'

Cohen said: 'Our contradictoriness. We are in such a hurry to grow up, and then we long for our lost childhood. We make ourselves ill earning money, and then spend all our money on getting well again. We think so much about the future that we neglect the present, and thus experience neither the present nor the future. We live as if we were never going to die, and die as if we had never lived.'

An Around-the-World Trip After Death

I have often thought about what happens as we scatter little bits of ourselves around the world. I have cut my hair in Tokyo, trimmed my nails in Norway, and spilled my own blood on a mountain in France. In my first book, The Archives of Hell, I speculated briefly on this subject, about whether we had to sow a little of our own body in various parts of the world so that, in a future life, we would be sure to find something familiar. Recently, I read in the French newspaper Le Figaro an article by Guy Barret about a real-life event in June 2001 when someone took this idea to its ultimate consequences.

The article was about an American woman, Vera Anderson, who spent all her life in Medford, Oregon. When she was getting on in years, she suffered a stroke, aggravated by pulmonary emphysema, which forced her to spend years confined to her room, connected up to an oxygen machine. This was, in itself, a torment, but in Vera's case, it was even more of one, because she had always dreamed of travelling the world, and had saved up her money in order to be able to do so when she retired.

Vera managed to move to Colorado so that she could spend the rest of her days with her son, Ross. There, before making her final journey - the one from which we never return - she made a decision. She might not have been able to travel even in her own country while alive, but she would travel the world after her death.

Ross went to the local notary public and registered his mother's will. When she died, she would like to be cremated. Nothing unusual about that. But the will went on to stipulate that her ashes were to be placed in 241 small bags, which were to be sent to the heads of postal services in the 50 American states, and to each of the 191 countries of the world, so that at least part of her body would end up visiting the places she had always dreamed about.

As soon as Vera died, Ross carried out her last wishes with all the respect one could hope for in a son. With each remittance, he enclosed a brief letter in which he asked that his mother be given a decent funeral.

Everyone who received Vera Anderson's ashes treated Ross's request with utter seriousness. In the four corners of the earth, a silent chain of solidarity was formed, in which sympathetic strangers organized the most diverse of ceremonies, depending on the place that the late Mrs Anderson would have liked to visit.

Thus Vera's ashes were scattered in Lake Titicaca, in Bolivia, according to the ancient traditions of the Aymara Indians; they were scattered on the river in front of the royal palace in Stockholm; on the banks of the Chao Phraya in Thailand; in a Shinto temple in Japan; on the glaciers of Antarctica; and in the Sahara desert. The sisters of charity in an orphanage in South America (the article does not specify in which country) prayed for a week before scattering the ashes in the garden, and then decided that Vera Anderson should be considered a kind of guardian angel of the place.

Ross Anderson received photos from the five continents, from all races and all cultures, showing men and women honouring his mother's last wishes. When we see today's divided world, a world in which no one seems to care about anyone else, Vera Anderson's last journey fills us with hope, for it shows us that there is still respect, love and generosity in the souls of our fellow human beings, however far away they may be.

Who Would Like This Twenty-Dollar Bill?

Cassan Said Amer tells the story of a lecturer who began a seminar by holding up a twenty-dollar bill and asking: 'Who would like this twenty-dollar bill?'

Several hands went up, but the lecturer said: 'Before I give it to you, I have to do something.'

He screwed it up into a ball and said: 'Who still wants this bill?'

The hands went up again.

'And what if I do this to it?'

He threw the crumpled bill at the wall, dropped it on the floor, insulted it, trampled on it, and once more showed them the bill - now all creased and dirty. He repeated the question, and the hands stayed up.

'Never forget this scene,' he said. 'It doesn't matter what I do to this money. It is still a twenty-dollar bill. So often in our lives, we are crumpled, trampled, ill-treated, insulted, and yet, despite all that, we are still worth the same.'

The Two Jewels

From the Cistercian monk, Marcos Garria, in Burgos, in Spain.

'Sometimes God withdraws a particular blessing from someone so that the person can comprehend Him as something other than a being of whom one asks favours and makes requests. He knows how far He can test a soul, and never goes beyond that point. At such moments, we must never say: "God has abandoned me." He will never do that, even though we may sometimes abandon Him. If the Lord sets us a great test, he always gives us sufficient - I would say more than sufficient - grace to pass that test.'

In this regard, one of my readers, Camila Galvao Piva, sent me an interesting story, entitled 'The Two Jewels'.

A very devout rabbi lived happily with his family - an admirable wife and their two beloved sons. Once, because of his work, the rabbi had to be away from home for several days. During that period, both children were killed in a terrible car accident.

Alone, the mother suffered in silence. However, because she was a strong woman, sustained by faith and trust in God, she endured the shock with dignity and courage. But how was she to break the tragic news to her husband? His faith was equally strong, but he had, in the past, been taken into hospital with heart problems, and his wife feared that finding out about the tragedy might cause his death too.

All she could do was to pray to God to advise her on the best way to act. On the eve of her husband's return, she prayed hard and was granted the grace of an answer.

The following day, the rabbi arrived home, embraced his wife, and asked after the children. The woman told him not to worry about them now, but to take a bath and rest.

Some time later, they sat down to lunch. She asked him all about his trip, and he told her everything that had happened to him; he spoke about God's mercy, and then again asked about the children.

The wife, somewhat awkwardly, replied: 'Don't worry about the children. We'll deal with them later. First, I need your help to solve what I consider to be a very grave problem.'