At his funeral, Connie gave me a tube containing a portion of John Matt's ashes. I put it dutifully in the spare bedroom (after all JM had spent time there while alive) and waited for the time to be right to liberate them. Almost a year exactly from the time of his death, on a cool beautiful January Saturday my friend Paul (also a friend of JM) and I hiked to the end of Folly Beach in the early afternoon with his ashes.

It was an incoming ebb tide. Paul brought a good bourbon and we drank to our memories of John Matt, to John Matt himself and to the ripples his short life has left on all he touched. A libation for JM... he was fond of good liquor.

The ashes were heavier than I had expected. Most fell straight to the bottom and disappeared with the sand while a few floated inward toward Clarks Sound and James Island. The outgoing tide in a few hours will carry them seaward past the abandoned lighthouse that JM and I climbed to the top of in the mid 1990s, past Charleston Harbor and out to sea. I didn't know what to do with the metal vial itself and decided that like a viking funeral boat it should be set free to find its own path. I guess a small amount of JM still had to be there too.

Paul and I had a bit more bourbon. Then we walked back down the beach and left JM to a place I know he would embrace.