Graves

I stood above my grandparent’s graves and wasn’t really sure what to do. My grandfather lived to ninety-three and the family that remained were few and scattered. So when I realized I was fifteen miles away from Niles, Michigan where my dad’s parents lay, I had left the interstate and followed the coast of Lake Michigan north to MI 12.

The small gatehouse was locked when I arrived. I contemplated the spreading lawns and stones, calculating how long it would take to find their plot. A flatbed landscaping truck pulled up and a soft-spoken man in a yellow tee-shirt asked if I needed help. His equipment belied his bearing, which was respectful and gentle, one trained in bereavement or at least sensitive to it.

He let me into the office and looked up the plot number on the computer. After consulting a larger map on the wall, he marked the plot on my smaller map. He started to give me directions, then changed his mind and offered to have me follow him. We turned on to a gravel road that looped through the old section until it became two ruts and finally a grass-covered track. There, my last name stared out at me from a stone.

So here I was, standing above them. I hadn’t expected the sensation that they were some how present. A scene from Our Town played out in my head where the dead sit on chairs in rows facing the audience. In contrast to the mourners who have come to burry another villager, they speak slowly, dispassionately.

I stooped to brush grass clippings and bird shit from the stones. My hand came away blackened with unseen grime. My eyes welled with tenderness or loss, I do not know.

I am a trained ecologist. I understand the process of decomposition and the fluid paths of nutrients. I have seen the number of macroinvertebrates in a slice of soil, and understand their work. And I know, too, that my grandparents both were cremated. For years my grandfather kept his wife’s ashes nearby him in a wood laminate box.

But somehow, I felt a connection with these stones, with the flecks of ash beneath, the shards of unburned bone. I looked up at the white oak that shaded their stones and knew it contained them too.

I visited the others in the plot, my great grandfather and his first and second wives and his daughter, my great aunt. I brushed their stones, pinched dead flowers from the geranium at my great aunt’s feet wondering where it had come from.

Too soon, I turned to leave. Reluctant to go straight to the interstate, I followed Rte 12 east through the towns of Edwardsburg, Union and White Pigeon. I smiled at the name, White Pigeon, and turned south to I-90 leaving Michigan and my grandparents behind.