Evergreens and Baby Roses: On Visiting a Cemetery

Certain things in life I have no real point of reference for, the top of that list being cemeteries.
This is because everyone in my life I once loved and thereafter lost (in chronological order: Grandpa Cees, Aunt Jaqueline, my mother, Grandpa D, and Grandma Mad) have never really had a gravesite.

Long story short:

Grandpa Cees went to a mortuary…where he, after being cremated, was mixed in with the ashes of his mother, my great grandmother Em (whom I never knew) and resides then as now on a third shelf, southwest corner, of a mortuary in El Cerrito, California. Granted, I walked past said mortuary every day on my way home from school, but still, never went inside. There’s a certain feeling, I guess, to be gotten from visiting a gravesite, and I have to imagine it’s not the same at all as what you get in visiting a bookshelf. About all I remember from that is the funeral, when we were seated in the back and the casket was in front and it was beautiful. Sea green and covered in flowers and my mom whispering to five year old me that Grandpa wasn’t really inside because he’d been cremated, whatever that meant…and the casket was ‘just for show’, kind of like my Barbie Dream House at home that Barbie could never stand upright in because the whole thing was too small but still looked stellar and sold well. Aunt Jaqueline, my mom, and Grandpa D and Grandma Mad…same scenario.

I threw my mom’s ashes (p.s., don’t be fooled. They’re not the fine-grained powder thin stuff you see in movies, in reality. It was more like post mix, like what you’d set a fence with) off a hiking trail above Half Moon Bay in 1992. Completely and totally illegally, in the company of her last husband, her twin sister, and my ex-husband. Given the wind force factor that day, should I ever really want ‘a place’ to go say hello to Mom, I’d have to cover everything from Monterey to Marin County. I’ve never had the energy or wherewithal for that so content myself with every visit to a Northern California beach I make, sure every seashell I find is one she tossed me. Grandpa D and Grandma Mad were both equally cremated, as was Aunt J, and buried on private property which has since been sold and nobody is saying anything to anybody about where that was because again, that’s highly illegal stuff.

So it was highly irregular and out of character for me, this past Saturday, to find myself actually finding the gravesite of one Mr. HGF, and leaving three corsages I’d collected at work the night before, comprised of (ironically) the evergreen boughs he apparently had an affinity for, and the baby roses I just found appropriate. I did this because I was, and will remain, probably and ridiculously forever, enamored of and in love with his oldest son. Talk about your pointless errands…but as I reminded myself that morning, sometimes it’s not about the point, anyway.

So I left them and that’s that and it was odd to be in a cemetery.

It was odd to have an actual place that you could point to, and say, “this is where they are,” when thinking about those you no longer have.

I talked with his son later, and he said he didn’t go, regularly.

I think I’d be the same way…if I knew that I had that place, and could go. But with Grandpa Mad’s place selling, and therefore her final resting place being private property and therefore impenetrable, and given the fact that there are a whole lot of beaches between Salt Lake City and Monterey…just going there felt more like something nice for me than something nice for someone else.

Call me stupid (you won’t be the first).

I’d do it again.

He must have been a heck of a guy. To have produced such a heck of an oldest son. And whether things turned out well or not (and I think we all know the answer there), no regrets. I’d lay baby roses and evergreens on his grave any day of the week. Whether he felt it was necessary or not. Reminded me, really, of the story my dad told, of how he and my mom were leaving the crematoriam and he’d tossed Grandpa’s Cee’s ashes, in the urn, into the trunk of the Jaguar he’d gifted him with. My mom, having scarcely met the man but loved him (because she loved his son) made him stop the car on the side of the 580 (no mean feat, as all native Californians know) so she could retrieve the urn, place it in her lap, and announce, “He wants sunshine! How could you put him in the trunk?”

OK, so Dad probably, at that point, deduced she was a nut job.

Oh, well.

Somehow, I don’t think she was so crazy.

Maybe it’s just me, but whether his son was home or not, HGF deserved a few roses, and I for one, weird as it was, am glad to have been the one to bring them.

And I would do it again.