Every year, I go through a personal and family ritual that sears my emotions. To understand why, it is important to envision the place. It is a small town cemetery that has been in place for a little over 150 years when the area’s first pioneers—English emigrants who fled persecution in the East for their religious convictions–first braved the harsh elements and hostile Indians to settle in the mountain valley where it resides. It is a beautiful place–especially on Memorial Day–ringed with dozens of American flags softly waving in the light breeze of an unseasonably warm sunny day. It is a piece of Americana that is disappearing in many places in the country. The small roads going through the cemetery bear the names of the sextons who tended the place for those 150+ years. Almost every grave is covered with a small loving blanket of flowers brought by recently bereaved and some quite distant ancestors of those who rest there. There is an explosion of color in what is otherwise a very quiet and sober—even sacred place. There is respect and reverence there; it is still strong etiquette not to step on the graves themselves. There is an invisible pathway just below the gravestones where one can be sure that no disrespect is shown the departed. Children quickly learn that they must not step on the grave stones themselves. The quiet reverence accorded those who sleep there is quickly learned, and even the children are aware that a hush is the appropriate tone in that place.
Most of the visitors have deep roots intertwined with their kindred dead in our cemetery. It is a place of stories. There are the resting places of men and women who served the cause of freedom and America and their way of life in a remarkable eighteen wars fought by Utah pioneers and Americans. The war dead come from little known conflicts such as the Blackhawk War, the Utah War (with the United States Army), the Apache and Paiute Wars, the Spanish-American War; and, of course, World War I, II, the Korean War, the Viet Nam War (my war), the Cold War, and the War on Terrorism. There are graves of men and women who paid the ultimate price in the ongoing War in Afghanistan.
I grew up here when the town—even the county—was very small; so, I know the people who lie in those graves and their families for the most part. The place holds much of my own history, and it is poignantly painful for me to go with my family to that cemetery. I am old now, and usually my life goes on without feeling the pain and loss that that place represents to me. I am, by nature, a story teller, and my grandchildren always want to hear me recount the story of this and that person whose grave we pass. I am always harrowed up to remembrances that I would rather leave safely compartmentalized in one of the back rooms of my mind. For me—and, I suppose, for them—it has Shakespearean [Richard II] overtones: “Needs must I like it well: I weep for joy to stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth… No matter where; of comfort no man speak: Let’s…make dust our paper and with rainy eyes and write sorrow on the bosom of the earth…Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs…Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.”
The stories that pour from my past—some from my tortured past—are not nearly so grand as the sad stories of the death of kings, but they are no less poignant. My father was the only doctor in our county for many of the years of WWII. He took pride in knowing the name of every person in the county, including the children and that he could recognize them by the back of their heads. He wished me to grow up strong and to be able to deal with the hard things of life; so, early on he took me along on house calls. I see the grave of a lovely woman who developed bilateral cancer of the breast and had a hopeless prognosis. I listened as my father told her grieving husband as gently as possible that his wife would soon die. It was the first time I ever saw a grown man cry. I saw the mangled bodies of men who were caught in mine explosions, and all of the horror that entailed; which—all too often—resulted in death. Their graves are there to remind me. I walk by the graves of babies who died of birth accidents, of infections which could not be treated since it was the time before penicillin. I came to know the grief, the agony, and finally the courage to go on my friends and neighbors experienced. Their ghosts are there in that cemetery, and they come back to my memory when I go there.
There are those graves which bring the memories into vivid personal relief. I was twelve when my father suffered a massive heart attack on Mother’s Day. He was unable to get out of bed for two years and grew absolutely frustrated by his impotence. So, one day—against his doctors’ and his family’s heartfelt advice—he got up, put on his suit, and drove to his office in the hospital he owned and began to practice medicine again. He knew he was a dead man walking, but he wanted to live out his last days doing what gave him life—caring for the people of his town. Two years after his heart attack, coincidentally, on Mother’s Day, I was working in a town five miles away from his hospital. My boss called me in to the resort’s hotel to answer a telephone call. I was told abruptly that I must come to the hospital. Now. I asked why, and the answer was, “Just come.” I caught a ride with one of the suppliers back to town. When I walked into the familiar hallways of the hospital our family owned, it was strangely quiet, sedate. A few people were going about their duties, and no one paid me any attention. They, in fact, avoided me. I walked alone into my father’s office and saw him lying with his head on his desk. I did not need anyone to tell me that he was dead. Once the gravity of what had happened became real, it fell to me to have to inform my mother. She never got over it. We did not acknowledge Mother’s Day for the rest of her life. She lies next to him, now at peace, free of the loneliness and torment of more than forty years she spent as a widow.
My boyhood friend is buried there. His family’s graves are a few steps from ours. He and I were inquisitive boys who were learning about rockets. On our own, we began to make a rocket using a lead pipe filled with gun powder and were ready for our first launch. We had fashioned a wick from one we stripped out of a long candle. We knew we could light the wick and have plenty of time to get out of harm’s way. What could go wrong? I went home to lunch with my mother and brother planning to come back to my friend’s house in an hour. That plan was forever interrupted by a sobbing telephone call from my friend’s father telling me that he had blown himself to pieces in their basement. I try not to look at his grave when I go there, but my grandchildren want to hear my story again; or perhaps, they want to see their usually icily calm grandfather cry.
I am irresistibly drawn to the grave of my daughter—my beautiful, perfect little girl. I steal myself not to cry. It has been thirty-six years now; and yet when I walk up to where she sleeps, I am tormented by indelible and perfectly intact memories of that, the worst day of my life. My wife and I were so distraught by her death that we could not bring ourselves to place her name on her little gravestone. Somehow, doing so would be to admit finally that she was lost to us. Every year we swear that we will remedy that folly, but we never seem to be able to face the task once we gain the relief of leaving that place. My grandchildren are respectful of me when I cry. They expect it.
I try to keep the stories of the lives of their kindred dead fresh and accurate in the children’s minds when we walk about that beautiful place. I remind them that the gracious and comfortable lives we all lead where paid for dearly by their great grandparents, whose graves lie there well-tended by the cemetery staff and by family. Those ancestors lived through the Great Depression. Both sets nearly starved to death during the dirty thirties, and they and my wife and I were forever marked by their experiences. We learned to work hard—we owe no one for the roof over our heads or the food on our plates. By habit, we eat everything on our plates, make do or do without, use it up, reuse it, and only throw it away when there is no further use. We eat left overs and are glad to have food; we do not take anything for granted. Our grandchildren see that as quaint. But, such is the legacy of those fine men and women who made the genteel lives of those children’s lives possible. My wife and I are glad to tell the stories of how they worked for a dollar a day—for a twelve hour day—gleaning potatoes. In the case of their maternal grandfather, he worked for a week for a sack of potatoes. They hunted deer for meat. We stand quietly by their graves and try to convey to our offspring the value of work.
The yearly visit to the graveyard in our town is a time of reflection, remembrance, profound sorrow, for a sense of loss, and for a sense of deep pride for the people who have preceded us down the final road we must all travel alone. I am a better man for making the painful journey into the past each year.