March 24, 2020 Remembering Leslie

I went for a short walk on Sunday and ended up in the cemetery near our house. Those of you who faithfully read my blog (bless you) have seen it before. One of the gravestones was decorated with a wreath, birthday greetings and some flowers still wrapped in cellophane, but faded and cold. I saw that the birthday had been March 16th and that the young man had been born around the same time as a couple of our sons and he had died in 2018. I wondered, as I often do in cemeteries, what interrupted story rested there. And I thought about the practice of visiting gravesites of loved ones and leaving tokens of love there.

My older sister died in June of 1987, just shy of her 33rd birthday, leaving behind a husband and two young children. Our family had a tradition of singing Christmas carols around the piano on Christmas Eve and as my sister had grown to be an accomplished pianist, she often played for us instead of my mother. Just one Christmas Eve before her death we had gathered around the piano to sing while she played, but our hearts were in our throats; her beautiful auburn hair had started to fall out from the chemotherapy. My mom stood behind her, hands lovingly placed on her shoulders as she played. All these years later, those memories still bring a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes.

On that first Christmas after she died, Mom asked us to go down to the cemetery to sing Christmas carols for Leslie. She didn’t have a gravestone yet, but we found the place where her cremains had been buried and on that cold gray day, chilled to the bone, we sang “Joy to the World” together, as well as you can sing when your heart is full of grief. It was our gift to her; it was our way of remembrance; it was excruciating and beautiful all at once.

But in the ensuing years, I found myself reluctant to return to that place. Every once in a while my brother-in-law would ask me if I’d been to visit her gravesite. I’d make excuses and he’d encourage me, saying, “You should go sometime.” Finally, on Memorial Day of 2014, our whole extended family went to the cemetery, partly to see the newly placed memorial stone on my father’s grave (he died in 2013), but also to visit my sister’s grave. It was the first time I’d even seen her engraved stone, the first time I’d been there when it wasn’t dreary winter.

Two columns of crabapple trees bordered a path near the site and just beyond that was a small lake. The crabapple trees were blooming and shedding their white petals in aromatic extravagance all around us, like a flowery snowfall. The tears that came to my eyes this time were not agonized and full of fresh grief as they had been the last time I had been here. Time had tempered the grief and made it sweet with memories.

And yet, I’ve only been there once since then. I’ve seen countless movies in which people visit the graves of their loved ones regularly, usually to speak to them, or to lay flowers on the grave in memory of them. Cemeteries are vast repositories of memories. Every year, the cemetery near our house fills up with flowers on Memorial Day, a poignant display of love. I wonder why I haven’t wanted or needed to return to my sister’s gravesite regularly or at least annually in honor of her memory. But at least I’m not avoiding it anymore. There is peace.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.