Linda Pastan, "Unveiling"
Mar. 8th, 2007 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

George cemetery
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.
This seems very apropos right now.
Unveiling
In the cemetery
a mile away
from where we used to live,
my aunts and mother
my father and uncles lie
in two long rows,
almost the way
they used to sit around
the long planked table
at family dinners.
And walking beside
the graves today, down
one straight path
and up the next,
I don't feel sad, exactly,
just left out a bit,
as if they kept
from me the kind
of grown-up secret
they used to share
back then, something
I'm not quite ready yet
to learn.
(By the way, the tombstone in the picture belongs to a great-aunt - my grandmother's older sister. Note the dates.)
no subject
Date: 2007-03-09 04:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-09 05:04 am (UTC)I like cemeteries, on the whole, but I do know what you mean about the loneliness. My mother's family was the center of my world when I was growing up, and they are all dead now. That aspect of it seems to have hit several of the remaining family members really hard (including me).
no subject
Date: 2007-03-09 06:36 am (UTC)Sorry, I'm not trying to be flippant. Just letting the imagination wander a little.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-09 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-09 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-09 04:42 pm (UTC)Hearing you talk about your family reminds me that there are pluses and minuses to everything; I'm occasionally sad about not having had a big, warm family situation, but that just means my sense of loss is around a different aspect of family -- you're getting your share now.
Take care.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-09 04:47 pm (UTC)Since I don't live in Louisiana, though, I've directed in my will that my executor try to arrange a "green" funeral for me. I don't want to pollute the earth more that I have already! Plus, I also like the idea of my body nourishing a tree or garden.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-09 05:51 pm (UTC)I do like the New Orleans alternative, too - one space per family.
I don't know that I've ever gotten around to saying this, but what we are doing with my mother's ashes, since she was pretty adamant about "being near" her parents, is burying the ashes in one end of the plot next to them - the idea being that later, if somebody else wants to do the same thing, we can double up. Apparently the cemetery people were fairly mystified by the whole thing - I guess it doesn't come up a lot in rural East Texas.