Merci Front-Ranger !
You are very poetic and remarkably thinking, connecting, in saying:
Artiste, you got me to thinking...Jack narrowly escaped being struck by lightning up on Brokenback, and Aguirre held it against him that sheep died, as if he could control the weather. But in the end he did control something about his own death. He asked for cremation, so in the end he was destroyed by fire. It was a bitterly fitting end for the man from Lightning Flat, high on the Wyoming plateau almost within sight of Devil's Tower.
Jack was reborn in a way, as his ashes would have fertilized the flowers that grow on Brokeback Mountain. The pasque flowers are beginning to show their buds right now, I'm sure!!
Front-Ranger, you are describing Easter! That? Or a religion named by either Ennis and/or Jack?
I still think that there could be OTHER scenarios, like Jack is still ALIVE, very much so; but why cremation? A ruse?
Au revoir,
hugs!