#89 paying respects
My great-aunt and aunt are visiting — I hadn’t seen them in years and years. When Mum told me they are visiting, and that they plan to go to the cemetery, I made sure I booked my flight back from Chicago to ensure I’m home today.
My grandfather passed away in 1992 and my grandmother in 2002. I can still remember how I found out. I was in London in 1992, fresh out of college and newly with mm. We’d been at Margate on Sunday and I got the call early Monday morning from my dad. I felt guilty that while everyone was at the hospital I was out having fun at the beach, though being 8000 miles away and unaware of the situation there was nothing to be guilty about. I got a ticket that day and it was a long, lonely plane ride to the funeral.
I was home in 2002, fresh back from Zurich. My grandmother had had a stroke a couple of years prior and was being cared for by Mum and my uncle. Mum called on Saturday morning, I dressed quickly and was lucky that the first taxi I flagged down knew the way to the hospital, even directing me to where the entrance was when we got there.
I don’t consider it morbid to visit my grandparents and great-grandparents in the cemetery. I suppose it could be a scary place at night but in the light of day all I feel is respect and a sense of purpose. How can there possibly be malignant forces present at such an overwhelmingly Catholic place?
First, sorry for your loss even though it's been years. It still always hurts. I know.
But second, I've never been scared of cemetaries. I find them facinating. When I was a child, we would go out of school and walk a field trip to the cemetary. There was a big duck pond in the center and some of the headstones were 100s of years old (as opposed to the ones in Texas cemetaries). Some days we would feed the ducks or eat a picnic or do tracings. We were taught how to respect the cemetary, not step on graves, etc. and even though there were no Jewish graves there (there was a separate Jewish cemetary in town), I would put rocks on the graves when I was finished looking at the headstones.
As I've grown up, I have found that most people have negative feelings about cemetaries in general but I'm not one of them.