Memorial Day Thoughts

I’ve never understood why people visit cemeteries.

A few weeks ago, I made two exceptions, a few days apart, one for a man I had once loved as closely as a brother, and for a grandfather who was so close that it feels like a part of me is now gone, and perhaps it is.

The two of them departed this life in very different ways, one faded away, and the other flashed out.  I don’t know exactly what I stood to accomplish by going to the cemeteries.  Closure, perhaps, to finish something off that had been brewing inside me since both of their deaths.

Pappy’s stone wasn’t hard to find.  I was alone in the small Missouri graveyard, so I got out of the car and just stood there and looked at it.  I had always considered myself his closest grandchild, due to geography more than anything else, but I hadn’t attended the funeral.  The old man had spent the last few months of his life in an old folks’ home, and while the flame flickered at times, he had always known me when I came to visit.

Mom had had him buried in his black suit, with a light green shirt and a tie he had worn only a couple of times in life.  I could almost see it through six feet of Missouri dirt.

I didn’t speak.  I always thought that talking to tombstones was a little weird.  I didn’t have anything to say anyway.  I said goodbye to him for the first time when I went to Iraq in 2005, because I thought I might not come back.  I said goodbye again in 2007, because I thought he might not remember me when I did.  I said it for what I knew would be the last time in June of 2010, when I left for my new job in D.C.  The last words I said to him were “I love you,” and it doesn’t seem like I could have done it any better.  Mom told me a few months later that he was gone.  I was the only grandchild not to attend the funeral. 

I took a deep breath, and told myself that this was okay.  I had said what I needed to say to his ears, and the others probably had to say it to his casket.

It had been a year and a half, and the dirt still hadn’t blended in with the rest.  In fact, there was a big patch of clover growing right over the top of it, the only patch in the whole field.  I spent the next five minutes looking for a four-leaf, something Pappy and I had done together many times in his yard, when I was barely old enough to walk.  I didn’t find one.

I brushed a bit of dirt back from his flat footstone that had been provided by the U.S. Government as a token of his wartime service.  I’ll have one of these someday as well.

A few days later, in a different field, I paid my last visit to my friend from high school.  Once upon a time, he had been a member of my “one hand”- meaning the friends that you could count on one hand.

He had left this life at a time and in a manner of his own choosing, more than 20 years later, but less than a day after my wife and I had pondered aloud how he was doing.

He had become a riverboat captain, and his stone was wrapped in a thick rope.  Next to the stone was a large glass jar.  It had somehow gotten a couple inches of water inside from the rains, so I opened the lid and carefully poured it out.  Inside was such a strange assortment of things:  A couple of pens, which he always carried, two debit cards from the local bank, an old lighter, and a notebook.  I assumed that these were items he had with him when he died.

I allowed myself to get a little excited.  He had often carried a notebook when we were young, he had called it his “brain.”  I opened it, but instead of seeing the notoriously sloppy handwriting, there were letters from his wife and children.  I read each one of them.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I did.

He had once considered me family, but adding my own thoughts to the pages seemed a little invasive, since his children barely knew me at all.  I knew what I would say, though.

I would tell them that forty yards away from their dad, lies the father of dear friends, a set of brothers close enough together that we hung out with all of them.  My friend consoled his that day in a way only he could have done, having already lost his own father.

Two years later, another of our group lost his dad, and my friend was there, too.  It wasn’t wise words or a caring touch, it was a cigar and a cold beer, and let’s go do something to take your mind off this.  At that point, “something” was blowing up an old refrigerator in the middle of a cow field at midnight, and it certainly took one's mind off mourning.

Ten years after that, my wife lost her father, and my friend was there again.

I would tell them that when we were kids, he had saved me from being bitten by a three-foot copperhead.  We had explored White’s Creek cave together, before the Forest Service put bars across it.  One night in town, he had pulled a toy gun on me, after I pulled one on him as a joke.  We stood there for a moment, sweating, each convinced that the other’s was the real thing.  He let me stay at his place when I didn’t want to go home. He had taught me how to drive a clutch.  I drank my first beer with him.  He had attended a few karate classes with me, and could kick harder than Bruce Lee, he said it was because he had practiced on cows.  He had showed up to help me fix Dad’s fence after my truck rolled through it.  We pondered together what to do about the tattoo with his first wife’s name on it after his divorce.  His creative solution was to add a banner with start and end dates below the big red heart on his arm.  He had married again, and taken her three children as his own when they were barely school-aged, and now they were adults.  We had shared all sorts of happiness and anger and laughter and fear, during that time in every man’s life when he is trying the hardest to figure himself out.

For all of that, and for all of the people for whom he was there, none of us were there for him.  I wish I would have called, but I didn’t even know I needed to.  I'm not sure how long I will carry that, but I know he wouldn't have wanted me to.

I put the notebook back in the jar, and put the lid on a bit more tightly to keep the water out.

In this field, as in the other, I recognized names.  Not just one or two, but dozens.  I remember what these people looked like, the sounds of their voices, the kind of people they were.

I suppose that is the reason people visit cemeteries.