As I said on Thursday, on Friday I visited the cemetery where my mother and father are buried. I did not take the dog -- it didn't seem to be appropriate etiquette -- and I'm glad I didn't.
My home town is a small country burg, under a thousand people, situated in a long farming valley. The valley probably extends for fifteen miles. It must have been a river channel once, perhaps 15,000 years ago when the water from the great Missoula Flood backed up for miles in all these lowland valleys.
The town is healthy, whereas many of these small towns have died. First, the stores in town begin to shut down. Then you lose either the bank or the post office, or both, and finally the school closes. That's the real death knell of the community. All that remains open then are the grain elevators and warehouses.
Back when my mother grew up, from the early Twenties until, say, the late Forties, the population of this county was actually much higher than now. That's because at that time you could support yourself and a family on maybe 250 to 500 acres. If you had more than 500 acres then you might have another house on your property, or at least a bunkhouse, for the hired man and possibly his family. I would guess the population of this county was nearly twice what it is now, seventy five years ago.
As time went by, this all changed, of course. By the time I was a kid here, you really couldn't support yourself on less than 1,000 acres. Now it's probably 2,000. Sons still take over the family farm, but there aren't as many of them. Most kids leave now. Farms have consolidated. Land has changed hands. Some land is now farmed by companies that are not local. When you're not tied to the land by blood, the heart goes out of farming. You care less about conserving the health of the land. You're just looking at the bottom line. You use utilitarian practices which may gain you more $$$ post-harvest but which really aren't good for the soil.
Still, my hometown has a sense of pride about it. The demographic is different now, though. It's no longer strictly farming families or people employed in the industries that support farming directly. Now it's a bedroom community for retirees or for people who commute to the nearest larger city, which is about 50 miles to the north. Hence, there are fewer kids. The high school's about a third of the size it was when I attended. Educational co-ops with neighboring towns have become a financial necessity, keeping the schools from shutting down entirely. It's also necessary to combine with nearby towns in order to field sports teams, due to declining enrollments.
All that said, the town looks exactly like it did 44 years ago when I left. The same grocery store is open, owned by the same family. The woman running it was my coach on the swim team in the summer; her son, who stayed and helps run the business, was four years younger and we lived together one spring in college. He has a nice, long Ho Chi Minh goatee, struck through with white hair. I said to him when I saw him, "Mike! We got old and grey! How did that happen? We were supposed to stay young forever...."
The bank is still there, the post office too. One pharmacy closed and another one opened. There are two small hardware stores, a gift shop that makes espressos (!!!), a second-hand store, and the grange supply turned into a "country store." All in all, everything looks the same. The houses and yards are well taken care of. The little town park is green and still has a swingset and a merry-go-round. Last night was Homecoming for the high school football team, but I didn't go.
You can drive through town in under 60 seconds on the main street. There are no traffic lights, not even a stop sign to slow you down.
A mile or two east of town, further on up the valley, on the sloping hill on the north side of the road, is the town cemetery. All these little towns have their own cemeteries. For some of these little burgs, there are now more people buried in the cemetery than there are living in the town itself. It's a way of life that I'm not sure will survive intact through the end of this century. Hope I'm wrong about that.
Anyway, our cemetery is really quite a peaceful spot. Lots of pines and other trees interspersed throughout. My mother and father are buried between two pine trees above and below on the hill, maybe 50 feet or so apart. As fate would have it, my grandmother got buried between my dad and mom. Just like in actual life, Grandmother always tried to come between my mother and father. They really didn't allow that. My mother always took the high road with her mother-in-law and probably earned some stripes in heaven thereby.
Dad died 35 years ago. I was 34 when he passed. We had been at war for thirty years by that time. He was a smothering presence in my life, one which I just couldn't seem to shake or get out from under. His own father had bailed on the family when my dad was one year old, so he grew up without a father. He thus overcompensated and overdid it with me. He had his own issues as a human being. He oh-so-gradually mellowed as he got older. We had some healing experiences together right at the end of his life. But that's a story I'll leave for another day.
Mom passed on my dad's birthday in 2015. I was preparing to move back home that summer to be closer to her, but she left before I could get there. I sat alone on that hillside by her grave and felt like an orphaned child. I don't cry often or easily, but in that instance, I let myself cry. I allowed myself to feel the loss.
For about a year prior, I kept dreaming that I was visiting my mother at home, but the house was always empty. And for about a year after she passed, I dreamt regularly that I was trying to find my way home, but could never locate the house. Eventually, I came to terms with the loss, as we all do over time, but still I feel guilty that I wasn't there for my mother in her last years. I was busy trying to make a life for myself in California, which never really happened. Now I'm back home and will make a new life for myself here, on the old ground.
I will probably choose to be buried in this cemetery someday. Let myself rot into good wheat-producing soil. It's a peaceful place. My two remaining sisters feel the same way.
Honestly, I don't feel like my parents are there. I go and visit their graves as a sign of respect, and I made a fall floral bouquet which I placed on Mom's grave yesterday (sorry, Dad!), but I don't really feel like they're present there. They've moved on. Wherever life and existence -- since I don't believe that anyone or anything ever really dies, but simply continues on -- have taken them, I trust they're doing well.
You see, despite the horrors human beings can go through on this earth, I have an overarching sense of faith that it all subserves a kind of long-term higher learning in the end. That may seem like a stretch for some of you, but it's a deeply rooted feeling in me. I understand it intellectually, too. Someday I will write about this at length in a book. But for now I'll just say that I trust that both Mom and Dad have moved on, have had a chance to review and digest their earthly experiences, and are probably both excited about the chance to continue to live, learn, and grow
Because, after all is said and done, that is what this life is really all about. I'll meet them both in some other guise down the road and we'll have a different relation to one another. It will be interesting to see where things go from there.
The visit put me in a pensive mode for the rest of the day. I wanted to write about it this morning, and then move on with my day. Life goes on. As it will when I pass as well.
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