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.
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.
Simply beautiful. Grave as metaphor. My cremated mother has no grave–or I should say her remains are nowhere below ground; they are scattered to the winds and ground into the soil at our family cabin, and urned beside my beloved dead cat’s ashes on a bookshelf next to poetry by Marge Piercy and other cat lovers who have lost their mothers. Sometimes I can’t remember which is which. My mother, my cat. My mother, my feline. They were alike in many ways–irascible, inscrutable, mercurial, tail switching and claws extended for life, claws retracted for loving and petting. They were two of the loves of my life; there’s another beside me.
Thank you for your kind and eloquent and very moving response. I have been thinking a lot about what it means to have my mother buried in a box in a formal cemetery. It does feel comforting to think of my mother’s name there for the ages on a plot of earth … and yet I am drawn to the idea of scattering her ashes back to the living earth (or my own living world) as you have done.
And Marge Piercy’s poetry—yes! I recently reread My Mother’s Body, Piercy’s powerful volume of poems about her mother (and her mother’s death). The end of the title poem has such resonance for me these days:
This body is your body, ashes now
and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts,
my throat, my thighs. You run in me
a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood,
you sing in my mind like wine. What you
did not dare in your life you dare in mine.
P.S. For those who don’t yet have it … Many bookstores may have this wonderful Piercy book in stock; it’s also available at my favorite online indy bookstore, Powells.com.
–Mia