Just a Stone

I just saw photos of his tombstone (like “died,” tombstone is another word I am only barely beginning to use). I wasn’t expecting them when I opened the email, and it was a shock. I knew the place that made it had installed it last week. They said they would send me a picture, but somehow I still wasn’t expecting it.

I don’t know how I expected to feel, but now that I’ve seen it, I feel confused and depressed that it is just a stone. Why do we call these “memorials?” How can it tell anyone anything about him? I wanted something very simple, because that’s what he would have wanted (and what I want, since I’m on it too). I specifically didn’t want anything with pictures or poems or fancy words in it – they work for other people, but they are not right for us. Yet now that I see it, I realize it doesn’t really say anything about him. I am not disappointed with the stone itself – they did a good job with it. Nor do I wish I had ordered something different. I guess I am just realizing what a limited way it is to capture a person for eternity, or to tell a stranger walking by anything at all about who he was. Somehow I had this expectation that once the stone was there, it would be a record of him, it would tell the world something.

Instead, it just says he was here, and that we were married for a long time. Not that he was smart, or funny, or a great cook, or a good son and father, or a friend you were lucky to have. Not that the long marriage that stretched between the years carved on it was better than we could have hoped for, or that this is the person I was/am crazy about.

When I go to the cemetery, I always notice the graves (unsayable word #3) that have lots of stuff on them – Yankee caps and photos and Happy Birthday balloons and toys and flags and flowers, and often you feel you know something about the person from what others have left there. I like that they make me feel I know something of that person. But ultimately I don’t care for those graves. They often end up looking messy and sad, because they are impossible to maintain. Sometimes they are tacky too. And what would I put there? I can’t imagine having his spot covered in taxidermy and golf clubs and fishing poles and Cowboys junk, and he wouldn’t want that either. But instead I have something that doesn’t tell anyone anything.

Maybe in the future, cemeteries will be interactive. People will scan a chip on the stone with their phone or something, and be able to hear audio about the person, or view pictures on their screen. Pretty soon there will be an app for that. It probably sounds awful to you, but I kind of like it. They probably already have audio for places where famous people are buried, but what about everybody else? This has made me realize that everyone has a story, and they all deserve to be told if someone wants to stop and listen.

I think I’d like to know the story of those who lie near him. They are kind of like his neighbors. There is a little boy buried next to him. That grave has a large stone, with a carving of the little boy and a big Elmo on it. When I go there, my first reaction is always that it’s nice that he has a little boy next to him. Then I realize that is an awful thought and I feel sad that a little boy died. There is a gentleman one row down from him who was a veteran - I met his granddaughter there one day. A few rows over are the father and the brother of one of Erika’s best friends. And a little way down from that the grandparent of Matt’s first girlfriend. Also nearby is the grave of one of Matt’s friends who died in a car accident about a year after graduation. Kirk coached him in baseball for many years, and liked him very much, and if they both have to be dead I am glad they are near each other. I will be buried on the other side of Kirk, and his dad and Sandy will be on the other side of me. A whole community of stories.

When I was trying to decide what I wanted the stone to look like, I looked at lots of other stones in the cemetery. The only one I really remember is one where the husband died long before the wife, and they had a shared stone. I looked at the dates and calculated that she had lived 22 years longer than he had. I was shocked and sad for her – I thought “How could she go on for 22 whole years without him – how hard that must have been.” It seemed like an eternity to live without the person you loved so much. Then I realized that unless I die in my 60s, it will be longer than that for me, maybe much longer. It makes me so sad and also makes me really realize that I actually do have to make a new life, a life on my own. 22 plus years is too long to just wait, too long to just pass the time, and too long to be lonely and sad.

I don’t like the idea that if there’s an audio/video story about me some day, there will be many chapters without him in it. Maybe the last line should be “And she loved him even more than she realized.”