Cemetery Run: Year Six

It was a bright, sunny day in the neighborhood when I got up and I had places to go and things to do including going to the cemetery to do some “housekeeping” around my husband’s gravestone before the Memorial Day weekend kicked into high gear. But first I needed to drop off my recycling at the transfer station what’s located along the way. I’ve been on a militant mission to recycle as much one-time use plastic, glass and metal as humanly possible. My recycling “come to Jesus” moment came after I posted the video back in April of a sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck all the way up inside his nose. I’ve always recycled newspapers, cardboard and pop cans but I didn’t think I was generating enough kitchen and household recyclables to make a difference. Boy, was I wrong. Before, I was going to the transfer station every 8-9 weeks but now I’ll probably need to go every 2-3 weeks and I’ve reduced the trash that goes out to the street for Monday pickup so much that it looks absolutely ridiculous in a tote big enough to hold 332.5 pounds. I’ve called around looking for a trash pickup service that offers smaller containers or once a month, rather than weekly pickups but they all seem to be using the same play book.

The cemetery was a busy place. Mowers and guys with weed whackers were working on the far side of the rolling, tree studded place and Boy Scouts were making their way down the rows of stones, looking for graves to put fresh American flags on. After I parked off to the side, careful not to encroach on any gravesites, I grabbed my long-handled shovel, a jug of water, scrub brush, plastic bag and garden gloves and I was surprised to see the tombstone looked better than it usually does when I do the spring the cleanup. Usually sod is attempting to take it over and the engraving in the marble is filled up with dirt. Others like me were parked here and there and as we worked the bees were buzzing, the birds were singing and the flowers were holding their faces up to the sun. A perfect day to be anywhere but where I was.

As I dug out the sod around the stone I thought about what I wrote in my blog last year---I had looked it up the night before. “This year,” it read, “is my fifth Memorial Day since Don’s passing and I could write exactly what I wrote last year: ‘I went to the cemetery on Saturday and had a talk with Don. I told him that I think of him often and that I’m doing okay even though he took a piece of me with him when he left.’” This weekend, my sixth Memorial Day of grooming his gravestone we didn’t seem to be on speaking terms and that may be because I had a half of jug of water left and I got side-tracked cleaning up a near-by grave of a veteran of the Korean War that looked pitiful and abandoned. I almost cleaned it along with Don’s last year but decided not to because I had just read another widow’s blog who had gone ballistic when she went to the cemetery to clean her husband’s grave and found it had already been done. She suspected his first wife did it and she was going to have a showdown over it. Dead and fighting over who gets to clean up after the guy! He must have been quite the prize. Anyway, I’m thinking if Don’s Korean War vet neighbor in the cemetery has a living widow around, I could take her down in a fist fight.

On the way home from the cemetery I got caught in a road construction maze. The street I usually go home on had been closed off permanently and the traffic light that used to be at that intersection was moved 200 feet down the road, at the exit ramp coming from the expressway. It’s not like we didn’t have a month of warnings. We did, but old habits are hard to break and thank goodness I didn’t make a left onto the exit ramp. (Someone's going to do it!) Turning around in the carpool lot so I could head back in the other direction, I found the brand new by-pass road that eventually connected to the road I needed. But on that road I ran into road block and had to turn around. AGAIN! I didn’t think I’d ever find my way home and I was running out of options. I ended up going way far out of my way but all’s well that ends well because that road took me to Starbucks and my Chevy Trax is programed to turn into their driveway.

As I jotted down notes for this blog entry I was sitting in their coffee shop, using the stainless steel straw I now carry in my purse---that’s how serious I am about doing my part to reduce was goes into the landfills and oceans. It was my first “granda Teavana shaken pineapple white ice tea lemonade sweeten infusion” of the season. They don’t tell you this, but ordering drinks at Starbucks is a senility test. If you get any one of those words out of order you have to start all over again. ©

Cemeteries and Guru Ants

Over the weekend I did something that should have been done around Memorial Day. I packed a bucket up with garden gloves, a spade, scrub brush, plastic bags and a gallon of water and headed off to the cemetery to tend to my husband’s grave marker. If the sod around the stone isn’t edged once a year, it wouldn’t take long for the entire stone to be covered over with dirt and grass. Location, location, location---like buying a house, when you pick out a gravesite location matters. Don’t buy one in a low spot. Of course, we didn’t think of that when my husband and I picked out our site. It’s in the same row as plots our friends bought and that pleased our funny bones to be neighbors when we die. Don is there waiting all by himself. Well, not exactly. He grew up near the small town where his ashes are interred and he delivered newspapers to most of the houses, back in the days when newspapers were the kings in the media world. He knew a lot of the people buried in the cemetery. He also trimmed trees and cut the grass in the grave yard for an entire summer of restitution for a juvenile crime. Hint: Don’t move city-owned picnic tables into the river. Yup, the guys in our row at the cemetery will have much to talk about when they reunite.

It was a pleasant day, sunny but not too hot and I got the edging done without taxing myself. Last year I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep up the stone’s maintenance but this year I realized my recent strength training at the gym made the chore not only manageable but almost meditative. I was so in the zone of what I was doing that when I walked back to the car I was surprised to see another woman was working less than 50 feet away. I’ll have to go back another day to affix a Snoopy trinket to the corner of the stone. It was too wet to do it while I was there. But I don’t know why I keep that tradition going because by fall some little kid will have peeled the trinket off the stone. I use Crocs shoe charms and if you hear about an old woman mugging a little kid to get the Snoopy charm off his shoe it will be me, taking back was as taken from the cemetery. 

I picked Saturday to go to the cemetery because there was an art show going on in the community pavilion in town and I wanted to know if any of the artists knew of someone who teaches painting. At the sponsoring group’s table they took my email address and I was told one of their members does hold classes. (Fingers crossed.) After checking out all the artist’s work I walked across the street to a hot dog place that overlooks the town’s damn and garden park. With my lunch packed to go, I went out their back door and ten steps later I was connected to the nature trail. I found a bench in the shade about a block away where I could watch the swans and kayakers go by. The trail was busy---bikers of all descriptions, skateboarders, joggers, dog walkers, fly fishermen, and people pushing wheelchairs. I’d done my share of pushing a wheelchair and walking the dog on that trail but a bad tick season made me stop doing the latter and Don’s death, of course, ended the former. It wasn’t a sad day of memories although earlier when I turned into the cemetery I was swallowing hard the way you do when you think tears might spill. That brief moment made me wondered if that was the reason why I’d put off doing my spring chore until mid-summer. But it wasn’t. I just got too busy.

As I sat by the river a slight breeze carried the sweet scents of summer and I glanced down to the cement pad my bench was sitting on and I got side-tracked watching a black ant carrying off a shredded pickle longer than he was. It had fallen off my hot dog. A piece of shredded cheese was near-by. I picked it up and put it down in the path of another black ant but he just walked over it and before I knew it I was engrossed in the curious dietary preferences of ants. Pickles and bun bits, yes. Cheese and onion, no. I thought about giving them a few drops of my Coke but I’m pretty sure that would have been akin to yelling “THE KEG'S HERE!” in a college frat house. Without planning it, without consciously commanding myself to relax and live in the moment, to mediate myself to a place of peace, it happened anyway. I was both in and of world, a god to ants in the same way some higher power might be putting ‘pickles’ and ‘cheese’ in my path to see how I’ll react. They say the benefits of Mindfulness (living in the moment) are: It reduces brain clutter, brings better force in your life, lowers stress, helps you better understand your pain and connects you with the world around you. I get that. I got that tenfold on Saturday. After spending over three hours between the cemetery, the art show, lunch and playing mindfulness games with my guru ants, I went home and took a long, dead-to-the-world nap. ©

“In today’s rush, we all think too much — seek too much — want too much — and forget about the joy of just being.” ~Eckhart Tolle

Interring the Ashes at the Grave

I woke up before the robins this morning with a dream still hanging around in the corners of my mind. I was searching in vain for Don’s phone number because I knew he’d overslept and wouldn’t be able to wake up without my help. My deceased parents were also in the dream and not at all concerned that I couldn’t find the number I was looking for. “Leave him alone,” my mom said, “He’ll be fine.”

It’s not unusual for me to wake up with a fragile dream hanging just out of my reach and sometimes I try to will myself back to sleep so I can finish the work my subconscious mind was doing in the night. But this morning I couldn’t drift back to sleep because I remembered this is the day Don’s ashes get interred at the gravesite---at least most of them. Some I’m taking to Lake Michigan this summer. I’m having trouble fighting the compulsion to divide his remains even more so I can leave some of his ashes at the farm where Don grew up and also take some ashes out during a bad snowstorm and let them go in the wind. (Don loved snowstorms and the plowing that took place after.) I’d also like to put some of his ashes in our backyard, at the house we built together. It’s a place he was immensely proud to live in and the first thing almost every morning that he lived here he’d sing, “Beautiful, beautiful!” to the walls. I can think of a dozen places I’d like to leave part of his ashes and burying them with a headstone is not one of them. 

But he wanted to be interned in this cemetery, in the town where he went to school, and where he once spent the summer mowing the grass as a punishment from the local judge. (Kids today are still messing with the city sign but few are as creative as Don and his friends who managed to change some letters around and create a swear word.) Don picked out the gravesite based on the fact that his life-long friends owned the site next to ours. That tickled his sense of humor on one hand, but on the other hand there was something deeply sentimental about his choice. Don was more sentimental than a lot of people would have guessed. 

At the cemetery the sexton asked me if I wanted to be at the foot or head of the gravesite because Don’s ashes would be placed at the opposite end and it struck me that these three guys---two sextons and the funeral director---would probably judge our entire marriage dynamics by the answer I gave. I went back and forth trying to figure out a logical choice and finally I decided dead is dead and what difference could it possibly make what I picked or what these strangers thought. They call it widow’s brain when you can’t make decisions and this decision made me feel like a driveling idiot. I did, however, decide quickly that I wanted a rock that the sexton unearthed while digging the hole for the box of ashes. Don and I never took a vacation that we didn’t haul a few rocks back home. 

I had the dog in the car and after the ashes were in their final resting place I took Levi down the near-by nature trail and I picked a spot by the river to sit down and reflect on the finality of getting buried in the ground. It was cold and windy with the smell of rain pushing in with the dark clouds over head. No other people were in sight but the sounds of nature were all around me---the trees rubbing against one another, a pair of broad-winged hawks soaring above, the current of the river making its way south---and surprisingly Levi sat quietly watching a chipmunk balling up a dried oak leaf to carry home. If it had been a bird, he would have barked. 

I don’t really believe that our dreams are anything more than our own thoughts, memories, fears, and imagination all twisted together and processed in the unmapped parts of our brain. I used to wish our dreams are windows into a parallel universe where we’d all go at night to live. I still believe that great movies like What Dreams May Come (about the hereafter) are born in a person’s nighttime dreams. But today the only thought I had about dreams is this: if there is even the slightest chance that some dreams are spiritual signs from the other side then my mother’s words when I woke up this morning are the greatest comfort I could have asked for at a time like this, that “Don will be fine” where ever he’s at in the great unknown. 

Note: The photo above is the rock from Don's gravesite. It measures nearly five inches across and if anyone knows what kind it is will you leave me a note? The photo below shows some of the rocks we've brought home over the years.