Our Most Special Place: “Great Gig In The Sky”

On Friday, I went to Sand Harbor. Kim and I spent many hours at there. Many, many hours. On some trips, we went there every single day. We’d set up our chairs and umbrella and sit with our feet in the water for entire afternoons and into the evening sometimes. It’s my favorite place in the world. Every time I’m on the highway approaching it for the first time, the moment I see it, I start to cry. I just get so overwhelmed. This year, when I rounded the bend and saw it, I cried, but they weren’t tears of joy. This time, it hurt.

For me, Sand Harbor was the place where everything was always okay. No matter what was going on, I was safe there. It always comforted me. I always said if I got really bad news, like if I found out I had two weeks to live or something, that’s the first place I’d go. If I found out the world was ending, that’s where I’d go. When I die, this is where I want to go.

When my mother died, this is where I wanted to come, but I couldn’t; there was too much I had to take care of at home. When Kim died, it was the place I desperately wanted to be, needed to be, but again, there were too many obligations at home. Kim and I had planned to come here on the first anniversary of my mother’s death, last October.  Instead, I was at home, mourning him.

As I drove into the park, I thought, This is where everything was supposed to be okay. But everything is not okay. Everything is not okay at all. I thought about how I was certain I’d feel better once I got up here, but I still feel so horrible. It doesn’t feel the same here at all. It doesn’t feel comforting, it doesn’t make me feel safe, it doesn’t bring me any relief. If anything, I feel even emptier than I did before. I spent months wanting to be in Tahoe, needing to run toward this, and I got here and realised there’s really nothing here to run TO any more. It’s still beautiful, it’s still my favorite place, but Kim isn’t here. It’s not the same without him. Even Sand Harbor — my safe place, my “happy” place, the place I close my eyes and go to when I’m really stressed by something and need to calm down — cannot heal the aching emptiness in my heart now. The saying “Wherever you go, there you are” has been going ’round and ’round in my head for days. It’s so true. Wherever I go, there I am. No matter what I do, I can’t get away from this. No matter how hard I try, I can’t make it un-happen. And yet, most of the time, I still haven’t been able to accept that it has happened.

We had “our rock” here, the one we’d always head for first. We always sat by this rock. Some years the water level was up too high for us to sit right next to it — our very favorite place — but we’d sit as near to it as we could. We got to sit in our spot last year.

I wasn’t able to get to that exact spot this time. It was about five feet out in the water. I was disappointed. But that’s okay, I got close, and was at least able to touch the rock and dip our rings into the water there.

Our rock at Sand Harbor. We would sit our bags on the small rock and place our chairs in front of it.

This is where Kim and I wanted our ashes placed. We didn’t want them scattered in this location. We wanted them buried in the sand in our spot (which is just in front of the small rock next to the giant one), so that if they got washed away, as they definitely would, they’d be pulled out into the lake little by little. It’s a beautiful location, and if they were scattered, there would be ash coating the surface of the water. Not only would the park rangers not be too happy about that, but no one wants to see big globs of grey ash floating around as they’re having their picnic by the lake with the kiddies. “Oh, look, kids, that must be Violet drifting by…. Everybody smile and wave real big!” Eeew.

Kim had strict instructions for when he placed my ashes there (with my poor health, we both assumed I’d go first): he was to dig a deep hole in the sand and as he was pouring my ashes in and covering them over, he was to listen to Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig In The Sky” for me, because that’s my favorite song of all time. That’s the song I listened to most while sitting here. Sometimes I’d set my iPod on repeat and let it play over and over again. Kim never mentioned to me what song he would have wanted, or if he even wanted a song at all, because we never dreamt I would be the one placing him here. And, well … turns out I’m still not, because I don’t have his ashes.

Since I couldn’t sit in our exact spot, I found another nice place nearby and got myself comfortable. I decided I would just play “Great Gig” for Kim, because that’s what was most meaningful to me.  Since he died, I’ve often pictured him, in some awesome club up in heaven, sitting around having a scotch and shooting the shit with Jimi Hendrix, Ronnie James Dio, Miles Davis, and Randy Rhodes and then they all hit the stage for a drunken jam. So “Great Gig” seemed fitting.

I fired up the iPod and sat looking out at the water for a long time, putting it on repeat several times. Perhaps not surprisingly, I broke down and started sobbing. I thought I would be able to hold it together better somehow, but I was wrong. I’ve been wrong about that a lot.

Every time we were at Sand Harbor, wherever we ended up settling down, I would record at least one video of the view from my chair at the edge of the water as I was listening to “Great Gig” so that I would always be able to have those specific moments in time to look back on in rough times. I did the same thing this visit, as I listened for Kim, only when I got back to the cabin, I discovered the camera hadn’t been level. Damn! So instead, I went back through several years’ worth of video files and chose this one I recorded in 2009 to share here. That was a year we weren’t able to sit in our exact spot, but we were close. And Kim was sitting next to me when I recorded this. So maybe it’s a good thing the new video came out crooked. This one’s more special. No matter how much I’ve lost, I will always have this. Kim spent the entire day looking out at this very view with me, by my side, on my left, the two of us together forever in this space in time. Maybe you can feel him there.