Nathania Gartman

Memorial Address

Michael Mountain's closing words at the memorial service:

When a beloved pet dies, people often talk of them as having gone over the Rainbow Bridge - to a place perhaps far away, where we, in turn, may one day join them.

Here at the sanctuary, we lay the animals to rest right here in Angel Canyon... at Angels Rest, just a few hundred yards up the county road from where we're standing now.

And members of Best Friends send plaques and wind chimes and flowers to be placed at Angels Rest in memory of a beloved pet - and, often, in memory of their human family, too, just as we shall place a memorial there to Nathania.

People who visit Angels Rest say that it's not like any cemetery they've ever been to before. They often comment that there's no sense of sadness. Just a very profound peace. A sense of rest. Angels Rest.

"This is not a place of the dead," a visitor said to me a few weeks ago. "It's a place of the living." Then he paused and reflected on what he'd just said, and was puzzled for a moment. How could a place that was specifically for those who have died present itself so clearly as a place of life - a place for the living?

But this would be no puzzle to Nathania or to the people that she would take around Angel Canyon as part of her workshops. They would come here to Angels Landing, go to Angels Rest, and then across the creek to the Underground Lake, and to the Indian caves. They would look at the petroglyphs, carved by people who came here thousands of years ago, and walk on soil that was first trodden by animals millions of years ago. They recognized that this was a place that transcended time.

An elder of the Paiute people once came here to Angels Landing to perform a tribal ceremony. And in his blessing, he said: "This is the place where the people would come each year to seek guidance from Mother Nature for their future."

In the last months of her life, Nathania was not afraid of what lay in her future. She knew that when her time came, she would not really be "going" anywhere. She knew that, like all the animals and all the people who came here before her - before all of us - that she had become a part of this canyon; and that she would always be a part of it.

She knew, too, that the rainbow bridge that she often talked about when she was visiting schools, does not really lead somewhere else, to some distant land; it leads right back to where we are now. Those who have passed on... live on, in those of us whose lives they have touched.

You, the young people who learned so much from Nathania, carry something of her into your own lives as you come of age.

As you care for the creatures, respect the land, and show kindness toward all living beings, her life lives on.

And all of us, who were her colleagues, carry on that work by showing an example of kindness and respect toward all the people whose lives, in turn, we touch.

Pastors and ministers and bishops often say that memorial services are not so much for the dead as they are for the living. Certainly, they are our chance to say farewell, but they are also our opportunity to take, as our inheritance, something that we value from that person, to nurture it, and to give it new life.

So in leaving here today, take something from Nathania with you - her kindness to all living beings, her love of children, her passion for her work with people young and old and, perhaps most of all, her love of this place and of nature itself.

Take all of this. For she offered it freely, and freely we have received it. And it is for us, in turn, to pass it along.

Farewell, Nathania. You will live on... in all of us, in the hearts of the people whose lives you touched, and in the souls of all the creatures you loved.

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