A Memorial Day Reunion

Dad led me there. I know that now. I had gone back to Illinois for a couple days, back to my roots, to the remnants of family still there.

On a wet, early Memorial Day morning, Dad requested that we visit my mother’s grave. I complied, feeling  a sense of obligation to them both.

Dad seemed determined to reunite us at the grave site. I never really knew my father except through my mother’s perceptions and judgments.

There was a family tradition of an annual pilgrimage every Memorial Day to our relatives’ graves. We always packed a spade, bucket, and scrub brush and stopped by the open market for flowers for the gravesite.

I watched the annual ritual of my parents filling the bucket from the nearest pump and scrubbing the flat headstones until the inscriptions could be seen.

As the years passed, the graves seemed harder to find, overgrown under unkempt grass with weeds sunken below the mowing level.

Dead people I had never known were conjured from memories. I was linked to these family ghosts by my mother’s stories and recollections. Over the years, I felt as if I came to know them, and they were no longer strangers.

Today my father and I stopped at a small flower stand near the cemetery. The plant selection was limited to a few shelves of drooping flowers.

Drizzle spattered mud on the leaves. I pruned off the dying petals and soggy leaves to make them more presentable. As always for these occasions, Dad brought a bucket, brush and spade along.

It was eight years since my mother’s funeral, the last time we were all together. At that time I was unable to cry. She had died when my life was coming apart; and I was experiencing another death, my divorce.

But today was different. I couldn’t seem to stop my tears. I couldn’t even speak as I watched my father clear away the debris and clean the gravesite the way I remembered it from so long ago.

As I planted, he spoke of coming to my mother’s grave often to talk to her. He told me that no one would ever stand up for him like my mother did.

He never said he loved her. In fact, he said he was happier with his new wife.

I couldn’t reply. Once again I was in the middle between them.

And then he told me something I never knew… he was always lonely with my mother.

In the quiet rain, I heard his pain and regrets as he apologized, saying there were things he shouldn’t have done and was sorry for.

Could my mother hear him? Did it take this long for there to be peace? He told my mother and me as we completed the gravesite ritual together for the last time.

It was a moment of truth at my mother’s grave and the beginning of forgiveness. It was the day I got to know my father a little better.

Copyright © Erana Leiken, 2010-2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Crying Rose photo by Joanna Kopik

Planting photo by Rodrigo Roveri