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Three things about transformation:

1) I can still see her face. She looks up at me, head bent over, hair partially covering her face. “I don’t know if Jesus turned water into wine,” she says, tentatively, as if I might not be interested. “But I do know that he turned crack cocaine into a couch and chairs, because that furniture is in my living room now.”

2) When a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, the entire DNA changes. It’s not about a bug getting wings. Rather, the caterpillar disintegrates and a new winged being rises out of gooey slime. Everything that was—every fuzzy bit of caterpillar—must die before the new can be born from the chrysalis. Scientists have named those first daring cells that initiate the re-creation process “imaginal cells.” It is as if these cells have imaginative vision and can say to each other, Yes! I know we need to give up all we have known, and I liked crawling, too. But can’t you see us kissing flowers, tumbling in air, all beautiful?

It takes a while for other cells to align with the frequency of those imaginal pioneers—for the impulse ratio to tilt from “remaining caterpillar” toward “becoming butterfly”—but at some point the whole system swings. Sometimes I pray that this earth is a chrysalis.

3) That early winter morning, I needed to be at the crematorium. My brother and I touched the white hair, said I love you and Goodbye, cried. Then we slowly pushed our father’s body—lying on its cardboard bed, that body so intimately familiar and yet suddenly so strange—into the big silver oven. We lowered the big door and looked into that room with no exit. My brother pushed a black button and I a red one to start the fires burning. I watched the thermometer slowly increase to the temperature at which bodies burn—1600 degrees.

I knew that my father, the scientist, would be interested in this process, and I cloaked myself in his objectivity. It gave me peace. “How long ‘til the whole body is burned?” I asked the attendant. Hours? Really?” I nodded thoughtfully to myself, as if time meant anything here. After a while my brother left quietly. I walked, prayed, laughed and cried, stared at that big silver oven door and that thermometer until my witness no longer felt needed.

I went to sit outside, for a quiet moment and fresh air.

I sat down on a bench and just as I sat, knew with utter clarity that what is gone forever from this earth is only the particularity of my father’s form. Personality, body, mind, sounds, smells, feel—gone. That barely discernable West Virginia accent, the dumb jokes and poignant memories he sent out on email, the memory like a steel trap—no more. Freed from all this specificity of location, his energy might be anywhere in the universe. I sat very still, grateful, looking out with unfocussed eyes into the gray day.

In the front yard of the house next door, I saw what I thought was one of those big fake grey plastic owls people nail on posts to scare rabbits. This one was in a low branch of a tree, maybe ten feet off the ground. What a funny place to put that, I thought to myself, and in curiosity my mind sharpened and eyes narrowed a bit to focus.

As I looked more carefully, I saw an enormous striped wing begin to move slightly. I stared in awe and then, as if in a dream, stood and walked, mouth agape, towards the tree. Dad! The word I spoke aloud came from the depth of my being, through a throat almost closed from astonishment. I stared into a face I knew well, saw a particular glint in that bird’s eye, a glint I had never thought to see again, staring back at me.

A person watching me walk across the parking lot might have thought I was an extra in a zombie movie—my mouth hanging slack, my arms lifting up towards the tree, my walk straight-legged and flat-footed. When I got very close to the tree, maybe ten feet away, the red tailed hawk flew directly in front of me up into the air, soared in a giant circle, flew back to the same tree and landed in a higher branch, looked down. We stared into each other’s face for what felt like eternity. And then peace swept over me, head to foot, every cell of me.

Thanks, Dad, I thought. Thanks, Universe. Yet another blessing received.

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Rev. Meg Riley

Senior Minister at Church of the Larger Fellowship

Meg has been a Unitarian Universalist minister for more than twenty years. As a UU kid in West Virginia, she quickly learned to enjoy being "different," which has served her well in a "different" life. Meg lives in Minneapolis, where she enjoys walking by lakes, gardening, reading and writing. She also lives online, where she enjoys hanging out, keeping up with people, and playing the occasional game of Scrabble. She is the parent of a teenager, and the companion of a number of four legged friends.

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