Yesterday I visited the cemetery, not because of Halloween, but because Lin is going to be buried this week and I wanted to make sure everything was ready for her. This is the place where my Mom and Dad are buried and also the final resting place for my sister and me.
When I was a child my family visited the cemetery in our neighborhood often. It was only a few blocks from our house and my Mom’s family was buried there. In the summer Mom and Dad would bring a large planter full of geraniums to put on the family plot. It was carefully maintained until the winter snows hit, usually about this time of year, and then it was stored in the basement until the next year. I loved exploring the cemetery when I was a kid. I liked to read the tombstones and plaques and imagine who these people were and what they might have been like when they were alive. This is a bittersweet time for me. It’s good to know that Lin will be in her final resting place, but it’s another step on the road to accepting the permanence of death and the deep loss I am feeling. I am happy she will be close. At the time my parents selected their burial plot we arranged for another double cremorial (that’s the cemetary's name for the bronze container with a plaque on top that they put your ashes in). Our ashes will eventually spend “eternity” together in this little box next to Mom and Dad. It’s a little weird seeing my name on the plaque with an empty space for the death date, but that is part of the process of aging. I have watched other people go through this deep acceptance of the fact that we are not immortal and that death is actually a part of life. I feel OK about it, not happy, not sad, just OK. Of course this cremorial only holds the dust of who we were. Our spirits will be someplace else. But there is something comforting about having an actual physical place to visit, like I did as a child when we went to see my grandparent’s and my Uncle’s graves. It makes me wonder if there will be people in the future looking for the stories on the gravestones the way that I did. Will they notice that my last name is the same as my parents and realize that two of their children are buried next to them? Will they figure out that Lin and I were twins, born in the same year but with different last names? How long will this burial place survive and what will the world be like when even this futile attempt at leaving something permanent disappears? We certainly won’t be studied like the Egyptian mummies. They tried a lot harder than us to leave something permanent and even their graves are a mystery. There isn’t much to be learned from the small piles of dust we will be leaving behind. Only the names on the plaque say something about who we were and they don’t say a whole heck of a lot. I’m good with that. I’m happy to just be on this planet right now. Tonight I will hand out cutie oranges to the handful of costumed kids that make it to my neighborhood, happily wearing my leopard ears and shoes and my tiger striped top. I am still a “cat woman” even though I am cat-less at the moment. It’s a good reminder that despite these mind bending realizations of what life and death are all about, life is good.
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Leslie Masona woman in search of her post-retirement future Guess what! By subscribing, you get notices about the latest Little Old Lady with Cats posts sent to your mailbox!
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(from an entry posted on 5/1/2015) “I definitely fit some of the characteristics of a little old lady with cats: Retired - check, Single - check, Like to knit - check, Have cats - check. . .I do not want to get stuck in my Little Old Lady persona, however. In fact, this blog is a risk taking experiment in exploring and redefining what I want my retired life to look like.” Categories
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