21 November 2016
I visited my mother’s grave two days ago. It marked the fourth year since her death. I’ve gone to her grave twice since her funeral, on her first anniversary and her fourth. For the second, I was sobbing in a dark room off of the nurse’s office at my middle school. I was in inpatient for last year. Those aren’t important now. My dad drove me to the graveyard. My sister, Sarah, met us there.
It took a bit of wandering to find the small stone slab with her name. “Claire Elaine Coale: a loving Daughter, Wife & Mother.” When I sat down, I could really only think of how the engravers forgot the Oxford comma. Yes, that isn’t the most important thing in my situation. But I could only thought of anything but the name in front of me. She was sick for all but the first four years of my life. I loved her, and often felt like she was my only real parent. In the years since her death, I’ve spent a year alone with a drunken father, two more with a shiny, new, stepmother to-be, and a year and a half in residential treatment. All of this took her away again. The grief remains, but memories don’t.
Sitting next to my sister at the grave was surreal. I held her hand and looking at the dirt caked into each crevice on the marble. My dad handed me a jar of my mom’s ashes. It felt foreign, and as nonchalant as holding a jar of honey. I’m an atheist. I’m not superstitious or spiritual. Her grave was rock over dirt over a casket of ash. I wasn’t sure how to feel, so I settled for a distant melancholy. I don’t even know why I insisted on going to the grave.
My dad was the only one who cried. It made sense. He had known her the longest, even if it seemed that he loved her least.
Sarah and I cleaned the stone off, restoring its polished shine. At one point, a worker patrolling the yard stopped to give us water. I wonder how much grieving he must witness each day. Sarah and I left first in her new, electric blue car, which quite contrasted the macabre background of the entire situation. My clothes were covered in dead grass and damp from the morning dew. We left my dad alone in the graveyard. She turned the music up loud, and we drove.
