Road Trip Grieving

I felt so alive this summer, as I drove back and forth across this great, lumbering country of ours.
I felt...connected to everyone, yet complete unto myself.
But when I got to Utah, a thousand miles from my house, and 2500 miles from Home, I had a moment of regret.
Sitting in my brother's dining room, birthday cake frosting melting into a puddle between us, laughter and distant conversations echoing throughout the house as everyone moved inside to escape the sudden thunderstorm--I realized what I had missed.
The thought was suddenly obvious--I couldn't believe it hadn't occured to me when sitting at my other brother's table, on the coast of Maine.
When he carefully brought the urn down to the kitchen so we could sprinkle some of our father's ashes into the roots of the tree we were planting, a tree to memorialize the man we lost just months ago.
(Lost doesn't seem like the right word, though, does it?
As though we had misplaced the man.
It certainly doesn't fit with his sudden, angry departure, nor resonate with the man who chose to skip to the end instead of letting old age destroy his body and mind further, to drag him through the indignities of hospitalizations and whatever else he imagined his 79th year had in store for him that was worse than leaping into the Great Beyond.)
But however you say it, he was gone.
He was reduced to ashes, kept in a jar.
And as I drove away from my beloved Maine--
his country--
and meandered across the continent, I didn't feel like I was on a journey yet.
It was when I arrived in Utah Valley, after starting my day in a dump of a hotel on the western edge of Nebraska, just in time for cake and candles and laughing and warmth and beauty--
talking with my brother
that I realized I was on a coast-to-coast journey,
and I should have brought my roadtrip-lovin' father for one last run.
I could have buckled the urn into the passenger's side and talked to my Dad as I drove.
I could have ordered him a cheeseburger at the drive-thru
(but that would have made me sad).
I could have tucked a bottle of No-Doz and a box of Sunmaid prunes in beside him
(two of his staples from the road trips of my childhood).
It would have changed the texture of my trip, for certain.
And I love the trip I had--
the days and days of driving in solitude,
me and my thoughts, and music, music, music!
But I regret not bringing him along...
he would have loved it.
And I owe him that much, at least.