WELLNESS
Honoring the Circle of Life Mosier’s Great River combines natural burial with ecology education story by JANET COOK | photos courtesy of GREAT RIVER
M
ost of us don’t like to think about death, much less our own death and what will become of us when it happens. Russell Hargrave didn’t either. But when his younger brother Robert died in 2009, that changed. Robert was cremated and after the funeral service, his ashes were distributed among several relatives. “I felt that one of the biggest shortcomings of how we dealt with his passing was that there was no place to memorialize him, no place where I might go to think about him, and find another
friend of his doing the same,” Hargrave said. “It left a yearning for solace that continues to this day.” Later, Hargrave moved his mother to the Gorge so she could be close to him and his family as she aged. He and his wife Stephanie began to think about what his mother’s endof-life plan would be. Then, they took the next logical leap. “I turned to my wife and, for the first time in my life, we looked at each other and asked, what are we going to do?” he said. “We looked Russell Hargrave, above, founded Great River two years ago, and has buried two family members there. 56
FALL 2021 II THE GORGE MAGAZINE
