Our fathers' graves
I had a zoom coffee date with a beloved far-away friend last week. He was talking about a recent trip back home to see his mother, and how he’d visited his father’s grave while he was there, something he hadn’t done in a few years.
I started to cry as he talked about his grief at his father’s graveside, and the things that he said to him, the things that he asked even though he understood that his father wasn’t there, that it was just a grave that held a coffin for the body that had once held his father, and a headstone with his father’s name.
I cried and I listened and I nodded.
(One of the many wonderful things about this dear man who has been my friend since the very first day of our freshman year at college is that he is a therapist, and so if I cry when we’re talking he doesn’t freak out. He just lets me cry and the conversation goes on. I know that if I wanted to talk about why I was crying it would be welcome, but I don’t have to. Not all tears need to be chased back to their source. You let them flow and get on with it. It’s such a gift to have a friend who is comfortable letting you cry, and who you feel comfortable crying in front of, trusting that it doesn’t have to be a big thing, but rather just an emotion you’re having in the moment.)
I cried that day because I was moved by my friend’s grief, but I also cried for myself. Just the day before our call, I had, in a way, visited my own father’s grave. I didn’t say this to my friend, because I didn’t want to cover his experience with my own. It wasn’t the moment for it, in the context of the larger conversation.
I recently took an online course on Jewish genealogy and how to trace your family tree (a tricky thing for those of us with European ancestry for obvious reasons), and in that class I’d learned that there was such a thing as a registry of graves. Go figure. So I searched for my dad’s name and found not just a record of my father’s grave, in which cemetery and which plot, but also a photo of his headstone. I hadn’t been expecting that.
I clicked on that photo. I enlarged it. I absolutely lost my shit. (I hadn’t been expecting that, either.) My father died in 1993, and even so the sight of his gravestone in 2024 was shocking to me. I know that my father is dead. I have consciously bumped up against that fact every day since June 2, 1993. And yet...
The last time I saw his gravestone was also the first time I saw it, at the unveiling ceremony a year after his death. (Jews bury our dead quickly, and then the gravestone is placed a year later. It’s a whole thing.) So I have been at my father’s graveside twice: the actual burial, a nightmare of a day, as you might expect, and I can still hear the sound of the dirt falling on his coffin, which is among the worst sounds in the world; and then a year later at that unveiling. That is, I know intellectually that I was at the unveiling. I must have been at the unveiling. But I have zero memory of it. It’s a blank. So when that image of a gravestone with my father’s name on it popped up on my screen, it felt like I was seeing it for the first time, and in that funny way that grief works, it felt like losing him all over again.
Now I live 3,000 miles away from that cemetery, but there were fourteen years between my father’s death and my husband and I decamping for Portland, Oregon, when I could have visited it. I bring the kids back home to the East Coast nearly every summer and could visit then. The cemetery is only an hour or so away from where my mom lives, but I have never gone back to where my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents and many great aunts and uncles on my paternal side are buried. I honestly can’t tell you why, apart from it being so much easier to not go, because the sadness is more bearable when you aren’t confronting a literal monument to your loss. And anyway, they aren’t there, right? The many members of my family who I have loved and lost? Wherever they are, by which I mean their essence, their consciousness, the part of them that would feel my presence and hear me speak, is not there in the ground.
(Here I am tempted to make a sweeping generalization that when we’re young our art is mostly preoccupied with love—the desire for it, the celebration of it, the loss of it—and as we get older our art is mostly filled with the things we want to say to our dead, the questions we want to ask them, the explanations we want to demand... Which is, I suppose, another form of seeking and celebrating and mourning love...? Okay, yeah...I need to sit with that a while longer.)
If funerals are for the living, then so are graves. They’re a place to visit and remember, a place to say the things out loud that you might otherwise swallow. It’s okay then, I think, if we choose not to go back to the cemetery, as long as we’re still remembering. (I am telling myself this, mostly, to assuage the guilt I’m now feeling at the thought of all of those tiny stones I haven’t left on his grave over the years. Feel free to be absolved, too, if you need it.)
My husband and I both plan to be cremated, which means there won’t be graves for our children to visit or not visit. Instead they’ll scatter our ashes somewhere, and either visit those places or not. Either way, I expect that we will be beyond caring. (Let’s hope so, for the sake of my father-in-law, whose ashes I’m nearly certain have been in my mother-in-law’s linen closet for decades. And in fairness, what are you supposed to do with those ashes if you don’t scatter them? An urn on a mantel doesn’t seem any better.)
It occurs to me now that I might have remembered incorrectly what my friend said about speaking to his father at his grave. I think what he actually said was, “He’s not there, but he’s not not there.” That feels truer to me, both to what my friend would have said and to what I actually believe. I’m now quite sure that is what he said, which is...well...memory doing its thing. Who knows. But if our loved ones are not present at their graves but also not not present at their graves, it would be because they’re not not present wherever we are. So go ahead. Talk to them. Yell at them. Ask them all of the questions you ran out of time to ask when they were alive, or the questions that didn’t even occur to you until they were gone, or the questions you never dared to ask but should have. And go ahead and cry. Weep. Right there wherever you are. It’s okay.
I thought I might close this with that image of my father’s grave, but he isn’t there. He’s much more present here, in this photo of the two of us together on the day that he and my mom dropped me off at college for the first day of freshman year. He died about a year and a half later, but as far as I know this is the last photo ever taken of the two of us together.
