I began writing this post yesterday, but had a hard time sticking with it. I had to make a cake instead. I mean I wanted to make Josiah a cake, but I’d be lying if I told you that there isn’t some part of me that still wants to run for the hills when I try to sit with the feelings. The grief can be crippling. At times, I find myself both unable to move and crawling out of my skin, but I suppose this is a common feeling and some of you might experience it too.

Anyways, I’ll let yesterday’s message flow from here and then circle back around with a little more about what I did for Josiah’s birthday. I’m glad that I put aside my trepidation and showed up for it in the ways that I was able to. These baby steps that I take day after day are paying off, sometimes in small and at other times, very large ways.

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It’s just after 8 a.m., February 21st, 2023. Today would’ve been Josiah’s 29th birthday. I’m sitting here at my desk, technically in the London Writers Salon where I write each morning, but today, my camera is off. Every candle in the house has been lit and is burning. The Grateful Dead’s “To Lay Me Down” is playing on repeat, tinny with entirely too much treble, out of the speaker on my iPhone.

I started the morning at 4 am. Smokey, the last dog Josiah would ever bring home to me, was crying outside of my bedroom door needing help with an upset belly. “Something’s going on,” I cried out, hoping Brian would wake and tend to him, but he was sleeping hard taking advantage of the final hours before heading back to work. I got out of bed, near 50-year-old legs stiff from the endless but mostly thoughtful plodding, attempting to stretch, one foot in front of the other. I followed Smokey down the stairs, opening the sliding glass door and around the corner of the house, not wanting him to go out in the cold and suffer alone. I walked right through Josiah’s wind chimes as they clanged into my head, filling the early morning darkness with the song that says, “Hey, Mom! I’m here!”

I know you are, but not in the way I want you to be… not in the way you were meant to be.

How the hell does 29 years pass in the blink of an eye? It just seems impossible… As the days grow longer and the time we had together slips further away, the pain has not lessened.

I wish I had something bright and cheery to say to you today, but I am struggling because the cavern created by losing him is still there and I fall into it from time to time. I wish I could’ve seen him grow up just a little bit more, to experience the fullness of himself, to find a love that filled him the way he filled my life.

I am making him a lemon chiffon cake today, filled with mixed berries and topped with lemon butter cream. Once Brian gets off work, we’ll head out into the oncoming winter storm, out the back way through Briceland, then wind our way through Ettersburg, down the spine of Wilder Ridge and into the Mattole River Valley where our lives began so long ago. I am finally going to bring some of Josiah’s ashes to release. It seems time to take him back home…

Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock his soul…

(check out this great version I just found of Brokedown Palace from Bob Weir and Wolf Bros. on Feb 11th of this year)

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Brian and I left Garberville just before 4:00, stopping in Redway to pick up a pizza ordered in Josiah’s name. We then drove out a road I’ve driven since the mid 90’s, once with a very tiny Josiah in tow. That road and the valley it leads to shaped both of our very young lives. Snow began to fall and started sticking right around Kings Peak Rd. worrying us that we were headed in the wrong direction — down to the bottom of the ridge, even further from home and away from my babies, Dharma and Smokey, our dogs.

We drove past old friends’ homes, past our old driveway, past the beaver slide where the logging trucks used to slip down, avoiding the switchbacks and then past the newer cut above Honeydew Creek at Landergen Road where we lived when Josiah was just three years old. We made it to the old Honeydew Creek campground with an hour or so left before dark. We ate our pizza, blew out candles, ate cake and then spread Josiah’s ashes in our old swimming hole. Honeydew Creek travels just a little bit farther before it drains into the mighty Mattole, taking those waters north to the mouth of the river near Petrolia, at the north end of the Lost Coast, into the Pacific Ocean, the only one he’s ever known.

Many of these places, this creek and why I brought his ashes there will be further explored in the book I am currently writing Remember the Birds. It’s the story of losing Josiah to homicide in 2019 when he and the driver of the vehicle, Jon Cleary, stopped to help two men stranded in the middle of the desert on the side of Highway 97 in Washington State while en route to a Dead & Company concert at the Gorge Amphitheatre. It is about all of that and very much about the love that we shared.

I’ve added a few photos below that I thought you might enjoy, along with a video of his ashes as they fell back towards home.

All my love,

Liz Hilderbrand, Josiah’s Mom

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