The other day I drove along Melville Road outside Cheney and just outside the chain link fence of Marshall Cemetery laid a lone bouquet. I’m sure it was more than likely left behind or discarded following a service the week prior. I could tell it more than likely appeared fake.
I’m sixty-five years old now and that day is slowly creeping up on me too. It is something I both dread and of course look forward to because after all, death and taxes are inevitable. When we’re young we don’t think about death or dying. We have grown accustomed to that being something our grandparents experience. Now I am that grandparent.
I looked out at the gravestones and flat grave markers and some crosses where the eternal residents reside. How they died, what their thoughts of things passed and yet to come, where they would go in the afterlife, whether their children and children’s children will remember them, and why here of all places.
It’s not a bad place; idyllic and serene, surrounded by pine and fir trees of varying lengths and shapes, and in the warmer seasons a lush lawn of green grass covers their eternal homes. I noticed many of the headstones were in disrepair. I wondered if the cemetery association or grounds people hired to tend this place also cared for the headstones, or was it the responsibility of the surviving family members? If that responsibility did rest with the family, then that will only last as long as that family member or children there after were well enough and able enough to do that necessary chore of love for their dearly departed.
Both my parents reside at the bottom of a couple of lakes near where my sister and I live. I know both mom and dad wished to be cremated but did not elaborate on what to do with their remains. We all just assumed they preferred what we did, rather than go through the added expense of placing them in a mausoleum. After all, after we are gone, who will take the time to clean their brass plaques? Who will lay a bouquet of fake flowers in front of their vault? Who will remember them in two hundred years?
All the cemeteries I ever happened upon, be it curiosity, a service, or no reason at all, such as today, those flowers are on those graves are there for as long as the living are not also residing next to them. After that there are no more flowers. Unless one is a veteran, as I am, no flags will adorn those graves either. They will be forgotten. The headstones will slowly deteriorate and fall into disrepair. Eventually, some real estate corporation will make an offer on the land and those graves will be removed and placed somewhere else.
My love for history dates back to when I was a young boy of ten and eleven when I took my dogs for long walks to an old cemetery far away from the town of East Wenatchee. The history of pioneering families coming to that part of Washington in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spoke volumes to my young imagination and I was hooked.
After I graduated from Washington State, I took a job working for a cemetery, getting the gravesite readied and looking appropriate. After all, death is inevitable, but no one wants to be reminded of their own mortality and doing the various maintenance and lawn care tasks required to make this final resting place look welcoming. The hardest job I ever experienced, and to this day it still makes me emotional was the day I hand dug a grave for an infant. The soil was rocky, as if God had preordained this spot where His babies would find solace forever. Everywhere else on that cemetery, the earth had little to no rocks, but not here. Not on this spot where children from after birth to ten years old rested.
After I’m gone, I too intend to be cremated and I wish my ashes to fly freely in the winds where I can be remembered for the words, I wrote not a gravestone for fake flowers.
Jerry Schellhammer 