reflections on the trip…

It’s still hard to visit the cemetery, no matter how cool I may play it off while I’m there. We took a big bunch of spring flowers up to replace the poinsettias mom had put out for Christmas. The wind had blown arrangements from other graves all over the place, but mom makes sure hers stay put. Even the single red rose she had placed on dad’s grave on their anniversary, though withered and dried up, was still firmly in place. There’s a little pile of rocks and clods that mom has picked up and piled behind the headstone, so that grass would grown in thick and even. She won’t just throw them over onto other graves, she’s been neat about it. She even makes the effort to try to stand up arrangements on other sites every time she goes. It’s her ritual and how she deals.

I dunno how I deal. Living so far away, I barely have any reminders of dad from day to day. It’s just really when I go home to visit Mom that it all comes up again. I managed to avoid looking at pictures on the walls in their house, because I KNOW where they are, and I can always manage to sit with my back to them. The cemetery is the worst. We busy ourselves with arranging flowers, with stuffing enough foam in to hold them securely, with straightening other sites, with picking up stray trash that may have blown in.. but eventually we’re done, and there’s nothing left to do but stand there and take in the full impact of the gravesite for the few moments before everyone gets uncomfortable enough with that and silently all consent to pile back into the car and leave.

It’s morbid, and it’s probably because I watch too much TV, but visiting the cemetery doesn’t make me remember Dad.. it makes me run horrible images through my mind of how his body must look in that casket after this much time.. because my brain knows that hair and fingernails continue to grow, and what soft fleshy parts rot first… and it’s really too morbid to write, but in the matter of a few minutes EVERY time I make a visit there.. even at the funeral, my mind will fill with those images, usually even full motion, eerily lit, the body at first the way I saw it last in the open casket withering further and further each time I visit.

Egad what a mood. It was upsetting enough Saturday to cause me to loathe spending Sunday with mom after sis and angle, left.. so I made my excuses, and left in the early morning hours with them.. “to follow them down”… even though their drive was much further, and I could have easily stayed until late afternoon and made it home.

Really glad I came home, though. Had a nice, lazy afternoon with a much less grumpy JamesT, who offered me a ring-pop at the Blockbuster Video =)

Oh well.. now maybe that this stuff is written down, I can quit thinking about it and get some work done.