A couple of weeks ago, I spent a hour or so stopping by gravesites in the cemetery where most of my family is buried. Death comes to all of us, of course, but it’s a curious thing when we go to visit Death.
| Paesi che non ho mai
Veduto e vissuto con te
Adesso si li vivro.
Con te partiro
Su navi per mari
Che io lo so
No no non esistono piu |
Time to say goodbye.
Places that I've never seen or experienced with you.
Now I shall, I'll sail with you upon ships across the seas, seas that exist no more,
It's time to say goodbye.
|
I'm not so into visiting cemeteries or places where people (even my loved ones who have died) are buried. It has nothing to do with fear or phobia, grief or sadness or denial or...whatever (as my teens would say).
I just don't see them there. Them. Those who've passed or died, or left us, or moved on. I've locked their essence in my heart, their voices indexed inside my brain. Their energy remains in the world, within the shared memories of those who remember them; their imprint on the world now is separate from the existence of their corporeal form.
But going to the cemetery presents me with the unassailable fact that it’s just my brother and I now, and our respective children – his daughter, an adult, my three daughters, both adult and near-adult, and my sister's children, both adults.
Perhaps from here we start history again, fresh. Both sides of our parent’s families - those siblings and cousins at the age of our parents and older, are now gone, with the exception of two of my mother’s sisters who are in varying stages of infirmity and failing health, both in their eighties. I can walk the rows of the cemetery and find a relative, distant or not, in practically every section or island of gravestones. Quite the legacy. I look ahead and I suspect it's going to be difficult to generate that communion it seems our families shared when I was a kid - the reunions, the get-togethers (okay, mostly weddings and funerals), the visits during roadtrips, the cards at holiday time. What has been the pre-eminent meeting of family members in these last five years has been solely through funerals.
With my mother’s death in 2002, I started to loosen my family connections. Life (my own as single parent with children) became too harried; time always at a premium. Maybe I unconsciously took it for granted that someone else would always be there to remember that geneology, or those birthdays, or departure dates from the old country, or the myriad anniversaries. Mother was the one who had the dates and events firmly in her head. Never wrote anything down, because "Mayme remembers". The irony is that her mind started to fail at the same rapid pace as her body. I say "irony" when I really mean a tragedy of immense proportions. She valued memory and her ability to photographically detail some of the most amazing facts as if these skills were gold. The flipside of her loss to dementia was that she wasn't really bothered so much by it - the fading was so rapid that she wasn't aware of how much she forgot - at least of those details that were recent and short term. The loss of most long term memory occurred towards that last year of life, and by then, that mind which stood as her remarkable source of pride, was gone.
Of all her kids, I was the youngest and the only one to really pay attention closely to the stories she’d tell over and over. The stories of Great grandma (Grandma, get your gun). The fishing tales of Alfred, my father. The riverboat captain with two wives at the same time; one North, one South. The anecdotes of travel in covered wagons from Louisiana and Missouri that my maternal grandparents, separately, both embarked on with their families – the road West. Snippets of stories of my paternal grandparents, both immigrants from Norway and settlers in Minnesota, where the family farm is, still tended by second and third cousins who I’ve never met.
When my mother died, so many rich histories never written down were lost to me and to my children. I had the oh-so-brief chance to discuss some details with my remaining sister before her sudden and unexpected death from terminal cancer last year. We thought we had so much time; she was only 68 and I was 48 then. We thought we would have years to hash out the details of the lives our parents and ancestors lived. Her memories in so many ways and on so many details were far different than mine, raised as we were in two different generations with our parents at two different socio-economic levels.
I grieve for this. I didn’t write things down. I didn’t tape the histories my mom carried in her brain as the family archivist that she was. I didn’t insist on names on those occasions when we leafed through boxes of photos. There are so many photos of unknown people standing next to someone known. These unnamed people are ghosts weaving through my residual grief.
These are puzzle pieces of people. Perhaps they have a place in someone's memory, in another photo album on a shelf in another house where someone may remember, before it's too late, what wasn't done.
Here is a link to all the previous Grieving Room diaries.
A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
lyrics above excerpted from "Time to say good-bye"; music and lyrics by Lucio Quarantotto, F. Sartori and F. Peterson