Catching up with some of those I've met in the Gardens

Sorry I haven’t blogged for two days.  I had a blog entry on Thursday but erased it—it was too personal.  I don’t think people want to read about my strange love-life.   I’d rather write about people I meet in Memory Gardens—which is why I started writing this blog in the first place.

I did some research the last couple of days though:  the first was a major in the U.S. Army who happened to be a veteran of both the Korean and the Vietnam Wars—for some reason I couldn’t find his service records in the National Archives.  Then I learned that was because he died in 1979, and the public isn’t allowed to see on-line after 1951.  If the military died in action, there are those lists everywhere.  Still, I kept feeling a strong, capable, decisive man as I searched.  I did find a photo of him on a deployment in the forest of Germany in the 60’s? 

 

The major in Germany.

 

Boy, he was handsome and in his late 40’s when he died.  I get the impression the major died due to an illness—not a sudden only like a heart attack—something like cancer—something that science couldn’t fix.  I liked him because he had the traits of all the soldiers I know—both alive and dead.  Even though he never saw action in those conflicts (another impression), and even though he might have been a tough boss when it came to his troops, when it came to his family, he was an old softy, generous, good-humored, loving, protective.

The second person I looked up was a little boy I’ll call “Bear” due to the fact his parents wrote the nickname on his headstone—along with the appellation of “Our Little Worm.”  (That made me laugh.) He was four years old when he passed, and the smile on his picture makes me want to go out of my way to see his grave when I take the pups out.  The dogs like his headstone and often sniff around it, even lay down next to it, as if Bear is there, wanting to play with them. 

 

Buster on the left--Beanie on the right.

 

Bear knows he died, but I can’t tell if he died due to illness or from a car accident—I’m leaning toward accident—a crash, where he was not in a car but one plowed over him.  He went quickly and met by a relative he knew; so he isn’t crying, wanting his mommy and daddy.  He told me he visits them often, but his mother cries a lot and can’t hear him talking to her.  He’s a great kid—a celestial angel—truly special.

One lady name Magritte has a marker with one of those funny notations on it.  She lies next to her son who died two days after she did.  She really must have had a great sense of humor because her family wrote under her name “I told you I was sick.”  I laugh every time I walk past her eternal bed.

A few yards away on the other side of a gravel path, one of her neighbors put one of my favorite scriptures on her headstone—“Why seek ye the living among the dead.”  Clearly, a woman who grasp of the spiritual was dead on (bad pun intended).

There is another baby in the “Kindergarten.”  I wouldn’t go by this lawn if I could help it, but it’s one of Beanie’s favorite places.  The baby’s name is “Sonny.”  He was a month old at the most when he died—the specific dates are not on the tiny head plate that must have matched the size of the little coffin his grieving parents laid him in during the 70’s.  I think Beanie and Sonny like hunting the lizards together.  These diminutive reptiles are three to four inches long and like sunning themselves on paving stones and gravel landscaping.  Once I thought I heard a baby’s laugh when Beanie practically buried himself in the middle of a pine bush where a couple of the little creatures live.  After I pulled him out, he stood there and cocked his round, black head back and forth, listening for his intended prey, the baby giggling when he came out of the bush empty handed—or should I say, with a mouth full of pine needles.

Beanie in the lavender chasing lizards

 

Although I didn’t see his grave, I met the mother of a local police officer who shot himself over a decade ago.  He left a devastated family behind.  His mother mourned as if it had happened yesterday.  I couldn’t find any fault in that emotion.  She didn’t know why he did it—didn’t understanding the pressures of the job he did. 

Her story had a silver-lining for me.  It made me glad that though my daddy suffered from PTSD after World War II, having seen, smelled, and lived through the hell of such ghastly events at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, he hadn’t picked up one of his many personal weapons or service handguns.  I don’t doubt such thoughts flashed through his insecure and occasionally depressed mind on some incidents in his life.  Yet his profound sense of professional duty—and also his eternal duty to his family kept such contemplations fleeting and at bay.  What the young police officer didn’t do was talk about his feelings to family or friends.  Pride kept him from going to another officer to admits his fear, his guilt, his hopelessness.

When I was a teenager, I can remember over-hearing my mother and father talking through the door of their room or through one of my walls which adjoined theirs.  Sometimes I could hear him complaining or expressing his fears to my mother, who really was a great listener.  She never said much until he had finished, allowing him to get what he needed to off his chest.

I also remember thinking, if I got married, I would be that kind of supportive wife.  Too bad the young police officer didn’t have a relationship like my daddy.

I’m glad the dogs have added a second walk to the routine of their day.  The light of the fading sunset bathes the garden in a comforting glow, softening the edges of the plaques and headstone  to match the rounded corners of the lawn sections, the gravel crunching under the pups’ little paws; the dirt rats and the lizards long-settled into borrows and crevices for the evening.

When the light of the cemetery’s sign begins to cast a glow on the grass and the bronze, I know we’ve stayed too long.  Bad people come out when it gets dark—their souls black, gloomy, angry. 

Memory Gardens just before dark.

 

Once we didn’t start home until dark started to engulf the park, and a heaviness entangled my feet, as if vines or thick mud made them weighty; I couldn’t walk fast enough to get home.  The pups didn’t pull at their leashes as was their habit; instead, they almost hugged my legs like children might on Halloween.  That was when I vowed never to get caught in the garden after dark again. 

I prefer the light, even the intense heat in comparison.  I revel in the sunshine, the happy glints and sparkles that blaze off the bronze plates and the shiny granite polished to such a high sheen you can see yourself or an ephemeral reflection in the multi-colored stones. 

Yes, I much prefer the garden in the day.  The light brings out a better sort of people.

 

Memory Gardens in the spring and in the morning.