Triveni Ghat

Lirio Hittle finds ashes, petals and the unexpected appearance of Ganesha as she mourns the sudden loss of her brother.

The bones they sink. 

The ashes float. 

They feather in the glacial waters of the sacred river.

Downstream they may become Ganesh. 

The god of new beginnings shows up at the start of any journey. The ear, the elephant head made of rose petals, the tusk made of marigolds. The ashes they form the tilak for the son of Shiva. My brother is right there on the elephant god’s forehead, transforming into the eternal. He leaves us behind. In our mortal forms still, we stand on the water’s edge at Triveni Ghat watching the ashes float away with the petals. 

Maybe they’ll come to me in faraway Rock Creek, bodies of water connected. Just as we once were through our parents. And will be again through waters.

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Artist’s (foot)note. 

On May 27th 2026, my brother and only sibling passed away tragically and suddenly. 

One doesn’t usually envision a younger sibling’s departure, especially when there is a surviving 92-year old parent.

The subsequent trauma of my brother’s funeral rites—a very large open wood pile funeral pyre on which his body lay, straight from the hospital morgue, unadorned. A pile of ashes and bones that I collected two days later, still smoldering. I was totally unprepared for the three men combing through the ashes and bones separating them to place in two bags, and even more unprepared for the ceremony which began with my touching the largest (vertebral?) bone to my forehead—it was still warm. 

The trudge to immerse his bones and ashes (asthi visarjan) through chaotic Indian traffic carrying one bag of bones, one of ashes in the car, to Triveni Ghat where three rivers meet and thousands of people bathe to purify themselves in this holiest of holy places.

At Triveni Ghat, I was terrified, devastated beyond grief, jet lagged from my 4-day journey over thousands of miles, and my throat afire from the smoke inhalation of the pyre. I have only a feeling of that place, a few visual snapshoots in my head.

For the next several days, when I closed my eyes to try to sleep, I would see his face in the flames, and remember what his bones felt like, I bathed several times to get the ashes (his and someone else’s nearby) out of my hair. That’s not something I ever imagined I would see or feel or do.

A week later, I started to make the pictures.

There were three stages in capturing my journey through this initial shock and trauma. The first stage yielded very representational pieces done in charcoal, evoking the dust and ashes everywhere. The second became more abstract as I tried to recollect and document the feelings, the colors, and the shapes.

The third came to me very accidentally, or perhaps it was preordained—where Ganesha, son of Shiva (who is most worshipped in that area of India) appears among the ashes and petals. It was as though the piece just made what IT was going to make. I was looking at the piece, and the shape was…Ganesha – there was an elephant’s trunk, there was a tilak (the three lines made of ashes on a devotee’s forehead), there was a broken tusk (Ganesha’s hallmark). Yes, that was it. 

My several art pieces and a short accompanying piece weren’t exactly cathartic for me. In fact, they were quite painful to make and write about. They are simply a record of my own journey in the aftermath of the shock, capturing a small portion of the ongoing trauma, stress, and grief.

Here, then is what I wrote up to accompany the art I made, to try to make peace with what happened on May 27th. 

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Lirio Hittle worked as the State of Hawaii’s first climate change coordinator. She is now based in Washington, D.C., and helps governments and community organizations respond to climate change. She misses the beautiful ocean and mountains of Hawaii but loves the majestic native forests and raptor life of the east coast.

Images courtesy of the author.