Breadcrumb #584
MAGGIE DAMKEN
Before we even get out of the car, the first thing I see are the empty vases cemented to either side of her headstone. Her neighbors are bright with pansies and peonies, sunflowers and calla lilies, and their dressings emphasize the barrenness of her marker. For a few moments Joe and I stand there in the heavy silence that always comes when we visit his mother, and then he says what I know isn’t my place to suggest: “We have to go get flowers.”
Mary Ellen, I’m asking you to forgive us for arriving without flowers.
At Aldi’s we almost give up, but we find two purple-yellow-blue bouquets waiting at the register, just as we’re about to call it quits. Back at the cemetery Joe breaks the wet, too-long stems with his bare hands to make them fit into the shallow vases. “You’re like He-Man,” I laugh, and then he laughs, wiping leaves on his jeans. He puts the bouquets into the vases; I fluff out the flowers, loosen them from the rubberband-tightness, then stand back and behold the brighter beflowered grave. I stand next to him, like I always do. I ask him if he wants to be alone, like I always do. Then I go back to the car, like I always do, and watch him miss her.
“Back at the cemetery Joe breaks the wet, too-long stems with his bare hands to make them fit into the shallow vases.”
“When you suffer a loss that early,” says Joe, “you don’t have painful memories but you do have painful questions.” At ten miles an hour, we wind through the cemetery toward its exit. “Because there’s a hole. And that’s mostly what I think of. Like I’m sorry we didn’t get to know each other. Sorry you aren’t here to see what’s going on. Sorry you got such a raw deal.”
My parents are both alive. I have always had them. I don’t have a mom-shaped hole. I put my hand on his knee as he pulls onto the road.
“And then I wonder if I’m talking to her or a patch of grass,” he says.
“Well she isn’t there,” I say. The contradiction doesn’t sit right, now that we’ve dipped our toes into the realm of the solemn ephemeral, where personal belief reigns. “That’s the physical spot where you visit her, but she isn’t there.”
“No,” he says, and struggles to articulate, “But I like to think ghosts keep tabs on their graves. Maybe. I don’t know.”
We ask so much of the dead. We give them so many apologies, so many explanations, even though they, like God, should be omniscient. Still we have to say our piece for ourselves; we’re alive, which means we can’t ascend into simply knowing. We have to work for it. Mary Ellen, I’m asking you, even though I don’t have to ask—I’m asking you so I know I’ve asked, I’m asking so I know I did what I am supposed to do—I’m asking you to do what is only natural for a ghost, a memory, a mother: be everywhere he needs you to be, exactly when he needs you to be, amen.