Bring Out Your Dead

We buried my sister on Mount Shasta amid sunlight and the sound of shofars. Turns out that shofars aren't typically used at funerals by the Jews but then my sister wasn't Jewish. I suspect she wanted to be.

My sister managed to marry her passion for religion and quarter horses...

The shofar is, of course, a ram's horn used mostly to signal the new moon. Even in the hands of an expert I hesitate to call it a musical instrument. In the hands of my dead sister's friends it was more like the bleating of an aggrieved wildebeest.

I don't really know if they were close friends or merely co-religionists, fellow believers in Jesus the Jew, a rather slippery messianic faith that included singing in Hebrew and the wearing of prayer shawls and white ceremonial dresses. My sister wore such a dress when she took the Glory Ride in 1996.

She was called KaTaHa then (but not by our mother). It sounds rather aboriginal but was actually a loose concatenation of her maiden and married name, Kathleen Thrasher Hunt. The Glory Ride, more commonly called the Pacific Coast Trail, threaded through the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains from Mexico to the Canadian border. It was on horseback. My sister managed to marry her passion for religion and quarter horses in an act of will and imagination that still staggers me with its acrobatic elegance.

I was never very clear on the details of her faith. She used a lot of Hebrew words, referred to God as YHWH and Jesus as Y’shua, and seemed to enjoy street theater. There were a lot of Hebrew words at her funeral and the shofars were purely theatric.

She had lived for years on Mount Shasta, a sanctuary for fringe beliefs. I suspect she had some trouble reconciling her own fringe fundamentalism with the Wiccans and crystal gazers that came as pilgrims to the mountain during the Harmonic Convergence but she was too kind hearted to be vengeful. She would never have made a good televangelist.

When my sister died, he drove her body cross-country in the back of his pickup.

She died suddenly in Colorado, ostensibly of diabetes but I suspect the coffee enemas contributed. It's my ill-advised opinion that you can survive only so many coffee enemas a day and five or six is too damned many! The quack who treated her thought otherwise. His only credentials were a recommendation from my sister's significant other and his own claim that the treatment enabled him to continue drinking when his liver should have long since failed.

Her significant other was named Ron. I don't doubt Ron was dedicated to my sister; I question everything else about him. He was one of those who believe that Federal taxation is a blatant violation of the Constitution, apparently unaware that the Constitution is a living document whose interpretation is continually changing and often contradictory, much like the Bible. Living his beliefs, he went off the grid—no credit cards, no loans, no legal ownership, not even a driver's license. There was no way to connect him to the house he owned in Colorado, the RV he owned in California, or the pickup truck he drove between them. He spent a lot of time in jail for his beliefs, mostly for traffic violations.

When my sister died, he drove her body cross-country in the back of his pickup. I can't begin to imagine what a macabre journey that must have been.

We buried my sister on Mount Shasta amid sunlight and the sound of shofars. She died at the age of 57, a brief life but an interesting one. Perhaps that's all we can hope for reasonably.