Driving home from Ludington on Sunday, during one of those stretches of silence, I thought of the cemeteries I have visited, for various reasons, over the years. While some are etched in my memory for valid reasons, others are there reflecting the mundane and even frivolous.
The first cemetery I remember is one located in Lampasas, Texas. It's the Oak Hill Cemetery and happens to hold the title of "Largest in the County" with "over 5,000 identifiable graves" (The Lampasas County Historical Commission). One of those identifiable graves is home to the bones and dust of one Rodney Herbert Yarberry; my maternal grandfather.
Given my mother's deep and painful issues with her father, I suspect being able to identify his grave is unimportant as I doubt anyone has ever visited it since the funeral and interment.
My memories of the man, however, are all sweet but I never really knew him until after his stint in the Colorado State Hospital that finally "cured" him of his alcoholism and he showed up in Killeen looking for a place to lay his weary head at his daughter's house.
My mother would have refused without guilt but my father - who hadn't know him "then" either - convinced her that he recent reactivation in the Church really demanded she relent and even forgive the man that had caused her so much pain. Since he died in 1960, I wonder if she has managed to forgive him.
When she speaks of him in public, it's always with warm accolades and the pretense of affection as she has never been able to reveal the truth of her life in public. This is a trait she passed on to me and one that has taken me decades to overcome and finally find some semblance of peace with who I am and the turmoil created by a broken family.
My grandfather and I shared a room for the last two years of his life and he shared with me all the stories that had survived in his pickled mind. I am sure that some of them were true, even if they were embellished.
The tornado in Colorado last week reminded me of one.
When he was a young man, he took a job as a cowboy in western Colorado. One spring day he was riding the range when a storm exploded, seemingly from nowhere. He told me of riding full-gallop toward some shelter and being intercepted by a funnel cloud that lifted him and his horse into the air and set them gently down several miles away; him still in the saddle and neither he nor the horse any worse for the flight. When I was 8, that was the critical part of the story. Now, however, I find it so fascinating that he was a real cowboy at as time when the cowboy life was fading into history. It is wonderful to me that the part of the story that is true, is now the most important part of the tale.
I remember him telling me about a time he and his brother were playing in a barn when a bucket of kerosene tipped from a shelf and the liquid poured into his brother's left ear and out the right. I also remember being extremely disappointed when I attempted the recreate the event with a cup of water in our bathroom sink and all I got for the trouble was water in my ear that took two days of intermittently jumping up and down to release.
I remember three women singing "O My Father" at his grave site just before they lowered his coffin into the hole. I decided to write a song called "O My Grandfather" but I never got around to it.
I have also never got around to returning to his cemetery, but I want to. I hope wanting to, counts in my favor.
I don't think I have ever seen his wife's - my grandmother's - grave. I am not even sure where it is.
I have only one, very vague, memory of her. I was on a lawn outside of a hospital and she was on one of the upper floors, waving at me from a window. I am not sure why, but I have no real desire to search her out. She doesn't seem like she's a part of me or my history. I am not bragging about that feeling. It's really wrong of me and something I ought to change.
The only woman I have ever really considered my grandmother is not related to me at all, by blood. She is the mother of my mother's third husband, the man who adopted me and raised me as his own, William Quantz. Her name at death was Alma Holstein and she is buried in Kalamazoo. I have visited her grave only once since her burial. I should drop by the next time I am in town.
Her son, my dad, is buried in Fort Custer National Cemetery near Battle Creek. I have visited his grave many times; generally around Memorial Day, but not this year. This year we visited my wife's father's grave in Ludington where his widow placed a flower arrangement next to his headstone and I watched her cry. Her home is a shrine to their marriage and her memories are always colored by the fact that he is no longer living.
One of my favorite cemeteries is the one located on Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is where my brother is buried.
It took me years to build the courage to visit the grave as I felt, for years, that I was, in part, the cause of his early death at 3 years old. When I finally screwed up the guts, it was a wonderful, cleansing experience. As I stood and wept at his grave I almost heard an angelic choir singing:
" And should we die before our journey's through... Happy Day! All in Well!"
He died early in his mortal journey but I walked away assured that his work there was more important than his work here.
Two years ago, Deb, Sam, Kathy and their children and I visited Robbie's grave. When we got there I noticed a dry, faded rose on top of his stone. Someone unknown to me or anyone in my family, had visited Robbie's grave. I was deeply touched by this action and have, since, made a small effort to look at the stones of strangers when I am in cemeteries and to offer a small prayer for them and their families.
When we were leaving the cemetery in Ludington on Saturday evening, I noticed a young man stretched out on the ground near a headstone and he was talking toward it. A thousand stories flashed through my mind as I watched him. I settled on one that identified him as the only son of a parents who loved him; a son who was rebellious and who tested the patience but never the love, of the man and women buried there. I imagined him to be the prodigal that returned too late for the fatted calf, the ring or the party. I pretended that he turned his life around after their deaths and visited their grave often to give a report on his life and achievements.
As unlikely the story is, it still is a good one for me.
On the trip home, Sunday afternoon, Deb and I took a side trip, off the expressway and onto some country roads. Somewhere on that side trip, we passed a little, family cemetery, ancient and weathered, on a farm somewhere between Pentwater and Silver Lake.
Wouldn't it be grand if families could be buried near each other again?
I would like to be buried next to my wife and near by children and their children so, in the Resurrection, we might embrace with our newly perfected bodies. As it is, Deb and I will probably be together but we'll have to travel to see the kids.
I am pretty sure, however, that travel then, will be quick as thinking it and that distance, like time, will mean nothing.
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