Michigan, 2001
My great aunt Hilda turned ninety on the Fourth of July. It's hard for me to comprehend all that she's seen and survived. At the age of seven, she rode in a parade to celebrate the end of World War I. Then she survived the flu epidemic that killed two percent of the world's population. The year she turned nine, her mother died in childbirth. Hilda, as the eldest, raised her younger sisters and worked so they could be educated.
In the early 1950s, after decades as a spinster, Hilda married my mother's uncle Philip. Phil and Hilda lived in downtown Flint, where Phil sold paint for Bronson Fischer. When he turned sixty, Phil decided to buy a farm out in Durand, Michigan.
When I came into the picture, I thought Phil and Hilda had always lived on the farm. I remember picking grapes in the arbor near the old farmhouse, playing with the farm dog called Sir John — after Shakespeare's Falstaff — and plunking away on the piano in the parlor while the adults exclaimed over Hilda's wonderful cooking in the dining room.
As the 1970s drifted into the Eighties, Phil and Hilda sold the farm and moved into an apartment on the outskirts of Flint. That must have been difficult: trading the quiet of farm country to live on the margin of a freeway. I didn't realize that Phil was already sick with the cancer what would kill him. He hadn't wanted to leave Hilda alone in the country.
Uncle Phil's funeral was the first I'd ever attended. I don't remember much of it now, except that Hilda was extremely gracious, touched that my brother and I would take time off from school to come. How could we not? She was family.
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When I got serious about visiting graveyards, Hilda was the one to point me toward Lovejoy Cemetery in Durand, where the circus folk were buried. (That story is essay #1 in this book.)
I eventually asked where my grandfather — Phil's brother Giles — was buried. My grandmother and her second husband are buried down the road from the farm where I grew up. I knew that Grandpa Giles, my mother's father, lay elsewhere.
Caught off-guard by my question, Hilda was surprised that I'd never visited Giles's grave. Since no one ever suggested a field trip, I'd assumed he was buried far away, maybe in Virginia with his birth family. Hilda shook her head. Giles was buried near Phil and Alice, Phil's first wife.
The graveyard was in Monroe County, south of Ann Arbor, as far south as you can go in Michigan before crossing into Ohio. Organized after the War of 1812, Michigan's Monroe County was named for President James Monroe. The county used to be much larger, until part of it was ceded to Ohio in the bloodless "Michigan-Ohio War" of 1835-36. What's left is mostly farmland, green fields separated by remnants of the forest that once blanketed the state.
I asked Hilda if she'd like to go with me to visit the family graves. Somewhere in the planning stages, our duo became a trio: my mom decided to come along. She likes cemeteries well enough — she's always suggesting new ones for me to visit when I come home — but she doesn't believe that dead people continue to reside anywhere near their remains. By the time they're buried, she believes, the spirit has already moved on to its final reward. That allows her to enjoy the "sculpture park" aspect of a graveyard, but doesn't give her the resonance of visiting her loved ones.
The three of us sank into the refrigerated luxury of Mom's Buick and headed south. I settled in for a long ride, notebook on my knee to catch the family reminiscences.
Mom remembered a childhood visit to the sanitarium where Phil's first wife was treated for the tuberculosis which would eventually kill her. To protect them from contagion, children were not allowed into the hospital. Mom stood in the parking lot, waving as hard and cheerfully as she could when Aunt Alice came to the window.
After Alice drowned on the operating table during emergency surgery to open her lungs, her coffin was set up in Uncle Phil's living room. Mom recalled how her teenage cousin Dick sobbed at his mother's funeral.
Hilda attended the visitation prior to the funeral as a friend of the family's. When Phil began to court her, my mom remembered them sitting so close in the front seat of Phil's car that it looked like two heads on one body. Grandpa Giles teased them mercilessly about that: acting like young lovers, even though Hilda was in her forties. Phil was even older.
I could have listened to the stories for hours, trying to capture a sense of people I never knew, family who are gone: both the deceased and the younger selves of the people I know now. I'll never grasp those people, but at least I'll have their stories. That's important to me.
Quicker than I expected, we pulled onto the asphalt streets of Pleasantview Cemetery. Despite a lack of curbs or street signs, the lanes were well maintained. My primary impression of the place was its spaciousness. Close-trimmed grass, just crisping at the edges in the summer heat, washed between the widely separated family plots.
A white-painted sign listed the cemetery's regulations: no ground plantings of any kind (meaning no trees or rosebushes on the graves); live flowers had to be in pots; no fences or pebbles around the markers; decorations had to be minimal.
I thought of the other country graveyards I'd visited, with their garden fences, raked gravel, hanging flower baskets, birdhouses, pinwheels, toys, stuffed animals, photographs, notes — exuberant connections to the dead who remained still very much a part of the family, still included in the yearly celebrations with jack-o'-lanterns, miniature Christmas trees, lilies at Easter, flags on the Fourth of July. From the street, Pleasantview's graves looked sterile and lonely.
While I sat in the back of the air-conditioned Buick and loaded film into my camera, Mom and Aunt Hilda walked over to the family plot.
My mom had a pink and yellow umbrella open to shield her from the sun. Ten years ago, she'd had melanoma, but caught it in time. Some of her uncles — with their red hair and fair skin — died of it. The parasol illustrated a survivor's joy and determination to continue.
Aunt Hilda looked very thin, legs like sticks in her nylons and low-heeled pumps. Even at ninety, she always dressed up to visit. Lately, she'd lost weight and no one knew why. Still, she seemed steady on her feet, despite the irregular surface of the lawn. We didn't know at the time she was in the first stages of pancreatic cancer.
When I joined them, the two ladies stood over Hilda's headstone.
I rocked on my heels, unable to voice everything that filled my head. I'd never before visited a grave with the person who planned to be buried in it.
I know it used to be common for women to buy joint markers, with their names engraved beside their husband's, if he passed away first. I think the tradition is to bury him on the side of the plot equivalent to his side of the bed. All my grandparents buried in Bendle Cemetery, near the farm where I grew up, had chosen joint monuments. In Pleasantview, Hilda and Phil had matching stones in adjoining plots of earth. They would be buried side by side, but in separate graves.
Hilda surveyed her memento mori with calm eyes, unaware of the way my heart pounded. I can't imagine what it must feel like to visit the love of your life — nearly two decades in his grave — and view the marker holding your place at his side.
Affection for my great aunt rushed over me. I've known her my entire life. She's always been family to me. She's all I have left of the generation beyond my parents, so I want to cling to her. I want to know everything she knows. I want her to live forever.
Unable to speak my thoughts, I said, "I wish I'd thought to bring flowers."
"There wouldn't be anyone to water them," Mom pointed out.
I'd been thinking along the lines of placing a long-stemmed rose on the stones of every name I recognized, but maybe that wasn't allowed. Maybe, as the sign said, flowers had to be in pots. Any potted plant would need water daily in the summer heat. It would be dying before the next morning dawned.
"I wish I'd brought my whisk broom," Hilda said. She brushed brown grass clippings from the stones with the toe of her shoe.
First in the row of markers, Grandpa Giles had a low red granite stone with a slanted face. Geometric lacework ran down its left side. I discovered he'd been born in 1898. That made him twelve years older than my grandmother and forty-three the year my mom — his only child — was born.
When Giles had his heart attack in January 1962, he didn't own a grave plot and hadn't left much money for my grandmother to buy one. She buried him with Phil's first wife's family, the Gramkies, though only law related them. There was room for him in their plot. My grandmother chose a red granite stone with an interlaced rose, to match Alice's.
Twenty years later, Uncle Phil lay beside him. Phil's headstone was more modern, slightly smaller and less slanted on top. A pretty engraved rose adorned the marker. Aunt Hilda said she chose the red stone to match Giles' and the rest of the stones in the Gramkie plot. Before her, Grandma had chosen Giles' marker to match the Gramkie Family's stones exactly. Strange that the widows felt it important to make that link.
Hilda has family buried elsewhere in Monroe County, where she grew up. One of her cousins is still living. I left Hilda and my mom to discuss dropping in on an elderly lady I'd never met. They were too wise to join me in prowling around the graveyard in the summer heat.
A small white marker remembered "Rich'd" Dugdale, from Company C of the Fifth Michigan Infantry, survivor of the Civil War. Poked into the grass before his tombstone was a star in a bronze-colored ring etched with laurel leaves. Other graves had metal markers from the International Order of Odd Fellows, symbols proclaiming fellowship beyond the grave. One of these had a crescent moon spangled with stars, cradling a songbird above the Odd Fellows chain. I wondered what the symbols signified.
A number of nearby stone monuments followed a wood motif. Hilda's grandfather had settled north of here to run a charcoal factory, clearing the primeval forest for farmland, then burning the lumber to make charcoal. Logging had been the primary industry in Michigan, before farming enriched the carriage-makers, who in time became the automakers. According to the last U.S. census, Monroe County's land had returned to the farmers.
Of the wood-inspired gravestones, the Kenyons chose lettering styled like logs to spell their family name. An arbor of bare branches framed the names and dates of Father and Mother Kenyon. Nearby, "Henry B. and His Wife Maria A." Morse were memorialized by a five-foot tree trunk. In relief, a calla lily and long-stemmed rose draped over the stump of a lopped-off limb. A patch of the roughly carved stone "bark" had been removed to leave a smooth space for their names, like graffiti carved into a living tree. Another monument was carved like a section of log, sized for the fireplace, with a piece of stone parchment draped over it. Lichen and years of weathering made the stone difficult to read, but the twenty-eight-year-old had died in 1909, two years before my great aunt was born.
I looked back to where my family was waiting, talking inside the air-conditioned car. Even after I decided this was a day to spend with the living, I kept getting distracted by unusual monuments on my way back to join them.
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"Love is Stronger than Blood" was initially published on Gothic.Net in August 2001.