“Hand me the ice scraper,” I asked my son as I knelt over my father’s gravestone. Using a sharp piece of plastic from the dollar bins, I chipped off the ice and snow that covered what was left of my father’s earthly presence. The boys each laid a flower on his stone and we spent a moment staring down at a man they remember little and I remember intimately. It’s been almost 11 years since his passing and we’re pausing to visit him before we drive home after a Thanksgiving weekend visiting my mother and the home my parents and I once shared.
I paused to take a picture. It’s a beautiful late winter
morning in Missoula, MT. Dad is interred at the top of a hill where he’d have
an excellent view of Mt. Sentinel and the entire Missoula Valley if only he’d
sit up. Perhaps it’s best he doesn’t.
“I checked on Dad. He’s still in the same place we left him,”
I wrote in a text to my siblings with the pictures attached. Everyone loves a little
dark humor. My dad did too, until his final years. When we were children, the
Tooth Fairy would leave us a rhyming poem along with a toy in exchange for our
tooth. Dad was the author of those poems, and Mother did the penmanship. The
last poem I received from the Tooth Fairy was when I was 22 and my wisdom teeth
were removed. Dad e-mailed it to my then-boyfriend who slipped it under my
pillow as I drooled in my drugged sleep.
Decades later, Dad had a testicle removed due to his cancer.
Riffing on what I thought was established tradition whenever a body part was
removed, I wrote him a rhyming poem from the Testicle Fairy and left him some
candy.
He was not amused.
Apparently here’s a fine line between dark and tacky that I
have yet to appreciate. I still think it was funny but maybe someone should
check in with me when my body parts get lopped off and see how I feel then.
The boys returned to the warm car and my Chucks crunched on
the snow as I walked to a cluster of columbaria across the cemetery where interred
were the cremains of a college friend who died 30 years ago. As I approached, I
noted the same faded and weathered nylon flowers left by others, the same neat
array of markers organized in perfect lines with perfect space. I went to a
familiar location only to find…a blank spot.
His marker was gone.
I circled the four columbaria with the only logical thought,
that I had shockingly misremembered his location. Like an accountant reading a
spreadsheet, my eyes carefully scanned each column and row of each side of every
columbarium. His name wasn’t listed. I scrabbled in the snow with the toe of my
Chucks looking for a marker that might have fallen off, but there was none. I
repeated these actions a second and then a third time.
He was truly not there.
Before I made it back to the car, I left a ridiculous voice
mail with the cemetery staff. “Hi, I’m calling to check on one of your…” What
do I call an interred dead person? Guest? Corpse? Box o’ ashes? “…residents. He’s
not where I last saw him. You know what I mean. Please call me back.”
Monday brought some answers. “Your friend’s ashes were
disinterred and relocated. Normally this happens at family request but we do
not have any information to share. Please call his family.”
Trying to contact my friend’s family effort occupied my
morning. Do you know what it’s like to try to find a landline phone number for
an 84-yr-old widowed woman who had probably remarried and I’d last seen 30
years ago when I was 14? I played Six Degrees of My Friend’s Mother trying to
find acquaintances who knew acquaintances only to learn that a surprising
number of middle-aged people from my adolescence are now dead. Apparently they
all got older while I stayed the same.
Mid-day a lead paid off and my phone lit up with a Montana
area code. “Hello?” said a slightly creaky voice. “I’m calling you back. Are
you looking for my son?”
I’m not a weeper but I choked as I introduced myself. “Hi-this-is-Timberly-and-I-knew-your-son-30-years-ago-and-I’ve-visited-his-grave-all-these-years-but-this-weekend-he-was-gone-and-can-you-please-tell-me-where-he-is?”
No, that doesn’t sound crazy at all.
She remembered me, or said she did and we talked for the
better part of an hour. Apparently 1992 was an eventful year for her. After the
death of her son, she remarried as I’d remembered and she had 30 happy years
with her second husband until he died recently. He was entitled to eternal rest
in a veteran’s cemetery. Thanks to my friend’s time in the Army before college,
he had the same privilege, so she had him relocated to be next to her husband.
Her actions felt familiar to me but I couldn’t place the feeling until writing
this now. My friend’s mother is nesting, but the end-of-life version. Instead
of what pregnant women do before they birth, she is preparing for her resting
place with her family.
She asked what life had brought me in this time.
“I graduated and went to graduate school in Arizona for
music. Then I married and got another master’s degree in business. We had two
children who are now 16 and 18. My dad died a few years ago and my husband and
I divorced but we just visited Missoula for Thanksgiving to see my mom who’s
still there.”
Fewer than 60 words summarize the last 30 years of my life.
It seemed like I should have more to show for myself.
It occurs to me that at 44, I’m now more than old enough to
be the mother of my friend as I knew him in 1992. Yet when I think about him,
I’m emotionally an ungainly teenager with the effusive grief of someone who
lost a wonderful friend in a tragic way. I’m also adult enough to realize that
inextricably bound in this grief is a host of related sadness: My dad’s death,
challenging family relationships, a rootless and awkward childhood with few
friends. My friend’s death isn’t only the loss of his life but representative
of unfulfilled possibility, both for him and, separately, for me.
We ended with her giving me the address for the cemetery where
I can find my friend. Next time I visit Missoula, I will look for him and take flowers
as I have periodically for decades. When his mother’s plaque joins his, I’ll
bring flowers for her, too.
And I’ll tell you one more thing: I am doubling down on keeping track of my dad from this point forward.
