Friday - Resthaven Cemetery
Jul. 14th, 2006 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermoreToday on my drive into work, I was thinking about the fact that my mother's birthday is coming up on the 23rd and that I need to make it out to Resthaven cemetery to drop off some flowers. It doesn't matter what birthday it will be for her. She is 51 years old, the same age she has been for the last 21 years, the only age she will ever be from here on out. Three days after her birthday, I will turn 37, the age she was when she gave birth to me.
I used to go out to the cemetery at least twice a year, on Mother's Day and her birthday, but since the birth of my son I have only been out there once, to bring him with me and to leave a birth announcement on her grave marker. In years prior, I had dropped of invitations to my high school and college graduations, and one for my wedding. They were courtesy invitations: the kind you give to a person who you know won't be able to make the ceremony, but might like to know about it, anyway.
I think I have walked every inch of that cemetery. After leaving my flowers, I always wander among the graves to put my grief in perspective. I peruse the sights and the offerings left at the other graves. I read their letters and cry for the ones who wrote them. I find solidarity and validation in every I love you, every I miss you, every I can't believe you are really gone.
I know some of these graves almost as well as I know my mother's. A few feet from her grave lies that of a 17-year-old boy. As the years have passed, there are fewer and fewer items left on his grave, but at one time he had more invitations, flowers, wind chimes and statues than I could count, new ones every time I stopped by.
Southeast of her lies a magician, with a wand, a top hat and a rabbit engraved on his stone. He was a husband and a father of young children, and they used to leave cards, drawings and even once a toy truck for him, though they are getting older now and seldom still do.
The graves with photos on them always make an impression on me. There occupants have faces and are less abstract, like the grave a 28-year-old woman named Pandora, whose large headstone bears her oval picture on the front above the words "Murdered by unknown assailants." She was petite and pretty. She had long dark hair styled in the big curls so popular in 1988, the year she died.
Not far from the magician is a little cowboy, three years old. His image is engraved with a lazar into his headstone: a smiling little boy dressed in full cowboy regalia, with a western shirt, cowboy boots and a great big cowboy hat on his small head. His marker says "Our Little Boot-Scootin' Cowboy." He died the year that the song Boot Scootin' Boogie was at the top of the country music charts. One Easter I saw that someone had put up a little fence around his grave, covered the ground with plastic Easter grass and plastic eggs filled with sand so that they would not roll away. A wooden sign next to his marker said, "Easter Bunny, Please Stop Here!" I cried when I saw it, and I'm crying as I describe it here, because I knew that stupid rabbit would not think to look for him in this place.
West of the little cowboy lies a pair of young lovers, buried next to each other beneath a headstone shaped like two hearts intertwined. Their picture in is the middle on the stone, taken at the boy's high school graduation. He is in his graduation gown, with his arm around his girl. I used to wonder if it was a car accident, until I met someone who knew them and found out it was a drug deal gone bad. He had been a small-time pot dealer and had dropped by one night to talk to a couple of guys who owed him a some money. He left his girl in the car and approached them, and since they didn't want to pay him, they shot him instead. When his girlfriend saw what happened she screamed, so the assailant walked over to the car and shot her in the face to "make her shut up." I remember thinking that if she had been my daughter, I would not have buried her next to that boy, no matter how in love they were.
The last time I went to Resthaven, I found something had changed in me. One of the graves I always looked at before was in the Baby Land section. On this one there is a picture of a little girl with curly golden hair. On her neck, beneath her enormous smile, there is a hole where she had a tracheotomy. She is very plump, the way a person looks when they undergo steroid treatments. On her marker, her parents put the entire poem, "Nothing Gold can Stay," by Robert Frost:
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Part of what made this marker so poignant to me is that the enamel-encased photo is fading from the weather, giving the little girl a glowy ethereal look, like an angel. The gold in her hair is fading in the sun, but I can tell they fought hard for her, to make her stay gold for as long as they could.
Once I became a mother, I found I could step foot in Baby Land, or even go near it. It became too horrible to think about, the little toys laying on top of the little markers, all so close together because the graves they mark take up only a few square feet. For the first time, after all of my cemetery wanderings, my grief is in perspective. I know it is inconsequential compared to some. There are worse things to be in this world than a child without a mother. Much, much worse things to be.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
I used to go out to the cemetery at least twice a year, on Mother's Day and her birthday, but since the birth of my son I have only been out there once, to bring him with me and to leave a birth announcement on her grave marker. In years prior, I had dropped of invitations to my high school and college graduations, and one for my wedding. They were courtesy invitations: the kind you give to a person who you know won't be able to make the ceremony, but might like to know about it, anyway.
I think I have walked every inch of that cemetery. After leaving my flowers, I always wander among the graves to put my grief in perspective. I peruse the sights and the offerings left at the other graves. I read their letters and cry for the ones who wrote them. I find solidarity and validation in every I love you, every I miss you, every I can't believe you are really gone.
I know some of these graves almost as well as I know my mother's. A few feet from her grave lies that of a 17-year-old boy. As the years have passed, there are fewer and fewer items left on his grave, but at one time he had more invitations, flowers, wind chimes and statues than I could count, new ones every time I stopped by.
Southeast of her lies a magician, with a wand, a top hat and a rabbit engraved on his stone. He was a husband and a father of young children, and they used to leave cards, drawings and even once a toy truck for him, though they are getting older now and seldom still do.
The graves with photos on them always make an impression on me. There occupants have faces and are less abstract, like the grave a 28-year-old woman named Pandora, whose large headstone bears her oval picture on the front above the words "Murdered by unknown assailants." She was petite and pretty. She had long dark hair styled in the big curls so popular in 1988, the year she died.
Not far from the magician is a little cowboy, three years old. His image is engraved with a lazar into his headstone: a smiling little boy dressed in full cowboy regalia, with a western shirt, cowboy boots and a great big cowboy hat on his small head. His marker says "Our Little Boot-Scootin' Cowboy." He died the year that the song Boot Scootin' Boogie was at the top of the country music charts. One Easter I saw that someone had put up a little fence around his grave, covered the ground with plastic Easter grass and plastic eggs filled with sand so that they would not roll away. A wooden sign next to his marker said, "Easter Bunny, Please Stop Here!" I cried when I saw it, and I'm crying as I describe it here, because I knew that stupid rabbit would not think to look for him in this place.
West of the little cowboy lies a pair of young lovers, buried next to each other beneath a headstone shaped like two hearts intertwined. Their picture in is the middle on the stone, taken at the boy's high school graduation. He is in his graduation gown, with his arm around his girl. I used to wonder if it was a car accident, until I met someone who knew them and found out it was a drug deal gone bad. He had been a small-time pot dealer and had dropped by one night to talk to a couple of guys who owed him a some money. He left his girl in the car and approached them, and since they didn't want to pay him, they shot him instead. When his girlfriend saw what happened she screamed, so the assailant walked over to the car and shot her in the face to "make her shut up." I remember thinking that if she had been my daughter, I would not have buried her next to that boy, no matter how in love they were.
The last time I went to Resthaven, I found something had changed in me. One of the graves I always looked at before was in the Baby Land section. On this one there is a picture of a little girl with curly golden hair. On her neck, beneath her enormous smile, there is a hole where she had a tracheotomy. She is very plump, the way a person looks when they undergo steroid treatments. On her marker, her parents put the entire poem, "Nothing Gold can Stay," by Robert Frost:
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Part of what made this marker so poignant to me is that the enamel-encased photo is fading from the weather, giving the little girl a glowy ethereal look, like an angel. The gold in her hair is fading in the sun, but I can tell they fought hard for her, to make her stay gold for as long as they could.
Once I became a mother, I found I could step foot in Baby Land, or even go near it. It became too horrible to think about, the little toys laying on top of the little markers, all so close together because the graves they mark take up only a few square feet. For the first time, after all of my cemetery wanderings, my grief is in perspective. I know it is inconsequential compared to some. There are worse things to be in this world than a child without a mother. Much, much worse things to be.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 01:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 01:56 am (UTC)Much, much worse things
Date: 2006-07-14 09:19 pm (UTC)but the negative stuff is still not something i like to deal with,.o.0
Re: Much, much worse things
Date: 2006-07-15 01:55 am (UTC)The dead don't suffer, but the living left behind do. Grief is a hole punched in your reality where a person used to stand. Coming to terms with this hole, with that loss and that longing, is the hardest thing we ever have to do in this life.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-17 10:21 pm (UTC)Of course, when it comes to my own dearly departed, I've found that it is much easier to reach inside myself to touch them -- something I can NOT do when standing by their graveside. This may mean that their graves go untended, but I seriously don't think they mind. As long as I remember and continue to celebrate their lives, that's all the memorial they need.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 09:50 pm (UTC)beautifully written
no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 09:52 pm (UTC)WOW.
I'm not a mother, but I am an aunt and love my nephew/niece more than any mini-human. I shudder at the thought of even walking through Baby Land. What a sad, sad place.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 02:06 am (UTC)Before, I had only a vague concept of how much worse that grief would be than the grief I had experienced. I figured that parent-to-child love must be something like the child-to-parent love I had already experienced. In reality, it's much more powerful and consuming, meaning that the grief left in it's wake can only be that much more devastating. It made me physically sick to even think about it.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 02:36 am (UTC)Dan works as a monument carver and he makes some pretty sad stones. Since we had the baby he's found a new perspective on a lot of them as well.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 06:16 pm (UTC)Grief never goes away, you just get used to it and learn to work around it. You never get "over" it.
(*hugs*)