Today, for the first time, I visited my mother’s grave. She is buried in the flat grassy octagon of a national cemetery near the airport; her grave is in a farflung corner alongside a freeway. How ironic, I think, that her mortal remains lie near fast lanes and flight paths, she who spent her life so trapped.

Seeing the marble headstone bearing her name was a strange experience. Her January death placed her grave among rows marking winter deaths, one of a thousand graves the groundskeepers dug in November, before the ground froze. The older sections of the cemetery have lush grass and mature trees, with the rows for World War I veterans especially lovely and moving. My mother’s parents are buried there—the orchestra leader grandfather, son of Polish Jews, who died the year I was born and the pianist grandmother I adored, daughter of Austrian Catholics, who died, at age 102, in 1994. Their gravesites are amid oaks with verdant canopies and pink crabapple trees in full bloom on a sunny May afternoon.

But the area around my mother’s grave is little more than a treeless dirt patch, which I find dispiriting. In truth, the grave does not feel as though it has much to do with my mother’s life, or my grief. Too, it is galling to see the “wife of” inscription yoking her to my father, and thus to the whole unhappy arc of her life that proceeded from her marriage; it is of course an unavoidable consequence of her wish that we take advantage of the thrifty burial option she had as the spouse of a World War II veteran.

Still, despite everything, I am a little moved to see this place where her oaken casket came to rest, this small plot of land marked with her name and the dates of her birth and death. Proof, perhaps: She was here in the world for 84 years and 8 months, she has passed out of the world into another state of being, she is remembered.

I placed a bouquet of tulips at her gravesite and laid atop the marker a small stone gnarled with quartz I took from my bookshelf: an invocation of Jewish ritual, a nod to the long-overlooked Jewish half of my mother’s heritage. Disregarding cemetery regulations, I had brought a bottle of wine and two slender glasses that were something like the juice glasses my mom favored for her brief happy-hour interludes—her 15 minutes of peace perched in her knit slacks and oddball vests and sensible shoes on the back stoop, gazing out over her nasturtiums or skimming a novel, enjoying a half dozen sips of chablis and a few cheese-topped crackers and, for too many years, her cigarettes.

Next to the headstone I propped the large photo I had displayed at my mother’s funeral: my smiling mother in a bright red jacket raising a wine glass (a proper one, tulip-shaped) in exuberant toast. And there in the dirt patch between airport and freeway, in the only place on earth indelibly marked with her name, A. and I toasted her right back.