In Rememberance

While in the shower this morning, I found myself reminiscing about the memorial days I'd spent with my grandmother. Just me and her. A seventy-five year old woman and her twenty-five year old granddaughter. She lived up in Liberty, Mo - a small town, or rather it used to be small until the urban sprawl hit it, just a few miles north of KC. It was a forty-five minute drive from where I lived and two or three miles from the airport. Since it took a while to get there, I usually spent the night in the brass bed, with a mattress that was so firm, it seemed to be curved in the shape of a hood.

We'd rent videos, get a French Silk pie from a restaurant that I can no longer remember the name of, and then on memorial day, take flowers around to the graves.

I remember watching her choose her flowers two days before, depending on how well the weather had treated them. If it had been a dry spring, or a cold one, or blistering hot, she'd pick the flowers from the hydragena bushes in the back - or at least I think they were called hydragenas. The big circular buds with all those little blooms in purple, blue and white. But if the weather had been kind, she'd select the roses. And just for a bit of flavor, put in a hydragena.

Plants are my grandmother's babies, she spoke to them, worried over them, petted them. Bred them. African violets sat under timed sun lamps in the living room and laundry room, different breeds, all created by my grandmother. The colors of the petals in perpetual bloom (if treated right, an african violet blooms all year long), ranged from deep violet to white, the entire spectrum. And in a small patch of dirt between the garage and the side door to her ranch style house, sat at least ten rose bushes, each a different breed and color. From blush pink to a deep purple, with a light violet interior. With her scissors she'd dance around them much like a primo ballerina, the bushes her partners, trimming and selecting only those roses whose petals were on the verge of showering the ground. The flowers she chose were bursting with petals, heavy and dropping from the weight of the head. When I asked why not take the prettier, more closed buds, the type I saw arranged in flower shops, my grandmother frowned, and patiently chided me, that it would be akin to murder. The heavier buds, the ones on the verge of falling off their stem, were at the end of their life - and would be a far better tribute.

She put them in different vases. Selecting flowers for the personalities she knew, and ones for the personalities she'd only been told about. A yellow rose for an aunt, pink and blue for her mother - mother's favorites she called them, perhaps a hydragena for her father who loved hydragenas, and maybe a couple of red and white for her husband, Fred, who preferred them simple and clean.

We'd take off in the Lincoln, a tank of a car, twisting and turning around the small sidestreets of Liberty to the first grave-yard. There were three that we visited. I remember asking why, and my grandmother would answer that we did it to show someone cared, to decorate the graves, to make them look less lonely. To demonstrate we remembered them even if for one day. It was a tradition she had followed since she was child. My grandmother did not believe in heaven or hell, she believed when people died, they died and there was no hereafter. She believed in God. She believe in Christ, Jesus. But not in the rest. Her faith was simple, private and to a degree practical. Her three daughters practiced other faiths, sang in the choirs of their churches, and attended every Sunday mass, while my grandmother seldom stepped foot in one. Even her own wedding was outside the walls of church - my grandfather being the son of a Baptist church leader who'd beaten his wife and children, frowned upon religion. He associated it much like he did his birth name of Augustus Ferdinand with his father.

I remember winding through the graves. It being late May, the grass was usually thick and green and the trees heavy with leaves. The first grave-yard was a small one, old, with large headstones, some dating back before the Civil War. I would read the obitaries posted on each - "Beloved John Caine - born 1706, died 1809 of scarlette fever" or something along those lines. Each engraving different. Some had Angels, and some just flowers or swirls. Granit mostly, it wasn't an expensive graveyard. Quiet too. Few people traveled to this one, since all the graves in it predated 1985. The newer one, up on a hill beside the highway, where my grandfather's urn sat, had plaque's not headstones decorating the graves. Both my grandparents wanted to be cremeated. The idea of being buried squicked them much as it squicks me. Cars lined this graveyard and whole families bounced around graves with screaming children playing tag. Military graves sat here as well, with little flags sitting in little vases at the foot of each plaque. Some graves had teddy bears, plastic flowers, photographs, and candles placed upon them making me think of a shrine. But most just had a little vase filled with water and flowers. The urns had vases on top or to the side, which my grandmother would place one or two flowers in, no more could fit - it was not like the graves in the small graveyard where she could place as many as she wished.

Once we completed our rounds, we would go to one of the local restaurants, order a burger and fries, maybe a piece of pie for dessert and chat about the past. She'd tell me stories about how her father had half the town at his furneral. Or why her husband used to be called the flying dutchman, driving his eighteen wheeler truck over a mass of hills, few trucks could get over easily, literally looking like he was flying. She'd talk about Great Aunt Kate and how Kate used to go around and decorate all the graves, spending five or six minutes talking to each person as she did so.

Now Memorial Day Weekend feels like just another holiday, the meaning washed out of it. Yet this morning, thinking about my grandmother, who currently sits in an assisted care facility in Hilton Head, SC, unable to decorate any of these graves, counting on my mother's cousin or relatives still in the area to do the rounds - and they still do them, I realize that more than Halloween, Memorial Day is a day in which we sit with ghosts. They multiply as we get older. These ghosts of times gone by, of yesteryear, of people who for whatever reason have drifted away from us - and of the dead, those killed in war, from disease, taken too soon, or at the right time if there is such a thing...I think there is having no real desire to live forever. Immortality has never appealed to me, which may explain why I find the idea of Immortality both fascinating and terrifying.

This year, the dead sit in my parents house drinking tea, their pictures in their guest room. Their chatter no louder than a whisper through trees. And for me? My dead stand around me in my memories, sneaking through the membranes of dreams, my old college friend Richard Walker who died of Leukemia when he was 22 years of age, he had wanted to save the world. A history major with a voice of gold. I miss him still even though I know if he were still alive we would not be in contact. That isn't the point, I miss what he might have done if given the opportunity. And my Aunt Audrey Amos, who died at sixty of a blood clot, we think. The aunt who gave me books and introduced me to science fiction and fantasy novels. Everett Reese - my English professor in high school, who few liked, but taught me what a good sentence meant and how to write one. My grandfather, Fred, who died of pneumonia brought on by the chemotherapy they'd used to rid him of his brain tumors. My grandfather who used to tell me stories about his past, and drove a rickety old jeep. Todd Simcock - the boy who died when I was a small child, he was the same age I was, barely seven, maybe eight, riding his bicycle behind a bus. If I close my eyes real tight, I can see him, blond hair, blue eyes, thin almost translucent white skin. Always wearing a cast or neck brace. I was too young to go to his funeral. And of course my father's parents - my grandmother, who always criticized, and my grandfather who ached to be more than he was, to see the world his son managed to see. My Uncle Jim who used to give me horseback rides and told jokes, dying alone in a fire. Simon - the cat I loved the most as a child, my best friend, hit by a car and found mangled beside the road by our neighbors....Even Oscar, the cat of a friend, that I rarely saw, but comforted me or rather we comforted each other when I first moved to NYC in 1996...

Sometimes I think the hardest thing in life is watching others die and the fear that I will outlive all my loved ones. I think it may be easier to die oneself than watch someone else do it. And I wonder if the funerals and the decorating of the graves on Memorial Day aren't more for the living who remain, than for the dead who merely haunt us in memory?