Completely in the Dark

The plaintive mourning dove—that’s a powerful memory.

As a kid, I thought the dove’s “coo-coo-coo” did sound sad. Not specificallysad, more like a meditative sad. It definitely made you stop, listen, and think about things, no matter what you were doing at the time.

And that sound is attached to a place—the very place my brother, his wife, and I are going to during the first week of April: our mother’s childhood home and what will be the final resting place of her ashes alongside those of our father’s. It’s a trip we’d planned to do a year ago, but schedules didn’t quite align.

We leave on Tuesday morning; my brother’s excited. Says he wants to visit our birth home. “Do you remember where that is?” he asks. “Yup. Broad Ripple. North Indianapolis, near the White River. East 64th Street.”

After that we’ll visit Dad’s only…