Cemetery memories ~ June 11, 1987

David Heiller

I walked up to the house on Saturday with my two kids. The grass was neatly cut, some thoughtful grandson’s handiwork. Peonies bloomed in front of the picture window. The garden patch showed off its neat rows of young vegetables. The pear tree swayed in the warm breeze.

Grandma Heiller

I stepped up to the picture window, half expecting to see the television silhouetting the hunched lady in her rocking chair. I gave a little knock on the window, remembering the first time I had done that in August of 1979. Grandma Heiller had peered through the glass, seeing her grandson for the first time in two years after he returned from overseas. She had stared, then smiled, and reached her right hand up to touch the glass as if it weren’t there, reaching for me.

Standing on the porch, I opened the screen door, and knocked. The inside door still had its etched glass, looking frosty as ever. I knocked harder. No answer. I remembered Grandma couldn’t hear well, especially with the TV on. Noah and Malika stood behind me. I wanted them to meet her, have a cookie, sit on her lap on the living room couch.

No one came to the door. We headed back across the lawn, past the flowers and garden, and I suddenly missed Grandma more than ever since she died three and a half years ago.

The Brownsville cemetery

We visited my uncle’s grave on Sunday. You wouldn’t have known the funeral was just last Saturday, eight days earlier. Sod covered the grave neatly; the edges flush with the rest of the lawn, no mud or trampled grass. Only several bouquets of wilted flowers showed the remains of the funeral.

David's father.

I could picture my aunts and uncles and cousins, standing in a circle over the open grave. I tried to picture my uncle. He was Grandma’s youngest son, and died in his sleep, just 49 years old. I could picture him back at Grandma’s house, leaning in the doorway, relaxed, smiling on his way somewhere. He was always passing through, it seemed. He could never stay long, and never had much to say. Some would call him distant, some shy. I didn’t know him well. Now, standing by his neat grave, I wished I had attended the funeral, to shake the hands of the three young men who are his sons, and to see my uncle as he passed through one last time. Grandma would have wanted me to be there.

We drove from the Village Cemetery to our church cemetery. Grandma’s grave lay toward the front of the maze of stones. Halfway back, we stopped by another grave, with two small markers on the ground. One marked the site of another of Grandma’s sons. This one was distant to me too. I didn’t know him either. I could picture him from the old photographs in my mother’s photo box, as she held his arm on a distant beach, he in his Army uniform, smiling, relaxed, on leave from the war overseas. April 25; 1953, the gravestone read, five months before I was born.

David, Grandma Schnick and Lynette.

Next to my father’s stone lay the marker of my sister, July 18, 1969. I could see her clearly, could see the newspaper, see the story of the Twins lying open on the kitchen table, with the minister and Mom and Grandma sitting around it, shoulders shaking, newspaper blurring.

We get home seldom now. When I visit the cemetery, I recall these things, recall memories that seem fresh, and memories that never really existed in the first place. Grandma’s house is no longer haven. The cemetery is the new meeting place, and the family lies in fragments, like pieces of a puzzle that is growing with every birth, and every death.