Memorial Days Past

I remember as a child our tradition for Memorial Weekend was to head to Lansing, an hour from home, on Saturday to visit our living Grandmother’s as well as to choose flowers to place on our Grandfather’s graves and the grave of our stillborn brother.

Even though this was a solemn occasion, there was always humor (or maybe better put back in the day was frustration - but humorous now) in the fact that we could never locate the graves right off the bat. Every year we went through the same rigmarole…Mom saying it was one direction; Dad insisting it was another. I don’t remember who won…maybe my sister, Barb, would know. But we finally got there by going ‘round Robin Hood’s barn.

Not having known my Grandpa Smith at all and only slightly knowing my Grandpa Fritz (I was six when he passed away and he was a very quiet man), their graves didn’t hold a lot of significance for me. Eric John’s grave was last. Unfortunately, he never had a grave marker so his was really tricky to find. He was born still 11 years before I ever came into the picture and 4 years before Barb was born. Even then, the section where his grave was located was always sobering because most of the graves had pictures of little lambs or baby cherubs. The inscribed dates were often only one day or a few days, maybe a few months or years apart at best. We knew this to mean that these babies had lived a very short time if at all outside the womb. That was always hard to understand.

Every year my mother would comment that they needed to get a grave marker. But with Dad pastoring a small church and a secondary income as a builder with the building industry waning, money was tight and there was always something else we needed more. One especially slim financial year, we went down for our traditional visit and were surprised to find a small block of cement with “ERIC JOHN, December 29, 1960”, roughly etched in the surface. Mom was momentarily stunned but soon realized that Dad was the responsible party. I don’t think he was prepared for her reaction though when she laughed. I’m not sure who we felt sorrier for - Dad with the hurt expression or Mom, who never got to hold this little boy and all she wanted for him now was a nice grave marker. Barb and I talked about growing and selling sweet corn that year to buy a marker, but that plan never came to fruition.

I don’t think I have been back to the graves since I’ve been married. But in the last year or so I have felt compelled to find out exactly where my grandparent’s and brother’s graves are. I would like to carry on a tradition of sorts…just not to include the trip around Robin Hood’s barn to get there.