Compost Studios

Yesterday’s crystalline blue skies and warm temperatures have been swept away. The sky is lint covered, the wind whips the leaves along the streets, and the forecasters are predicting cold weather beginning tomorrow.

Walking down a cottonwood-lined lane early this morning, I notice all the cars at the small cemetery there. For the last few days, Belgians have devoted considerable time to visiting and tending the graves of their loved ones. While Americans create false graveyards, hang skeletons, and dress as ghosts and zombies for Halloween, Belgians honor the dead.

Tomorrow is All Souls Day (sometimes called All Saints Day) and it is a national holiday here, a day to remember the dead. At the cemetery, I’ve seen families washing headstones, children placing enormous containers of mums on graves, and memorabilia being added to others.

During an earlier walk, I noticed the grave of a child in the cemetery. Only a year old, her mischievous face grins from a photo set in her headstone. I always pray for her family when I come here. Today they have covered her grave in white mums and placed a ceramic teddy bear there. At another grave, that of a young man who died in his early 20s, someone comes by and leaves cans of unopened Lipton’s Ice Tea. Mostly though, people leave yellow and red mums planted in containers on the graves, so the entire cemetery is washed in color.

In the U.S., Southerners were renowned for the way they tended family graves through generations. It’s sad that as our families broke apart, both socially and geographically, family plots and grave yards disappeared and so did the rituals of honoring the dead.

My parents never took me to a cemetery. I don’t know where my grandparents are buried. My sister is buried on Long Island somewhere. I have never visited her grave. She died of cancer when I was in college in Virginia. I left school to go to her funeral but never made it back to the cemetery after that, in part because I got married and moved to Oklahoma months later.

When I was going through my parents’ photo collection after their deaths, I found a photo of her snow-covered grave decorated with greenery and a red bow. A German friend of my mother’s had gone to the grave on my mother’s behalf at Christmas, and I can’t express what that gesture meant to me when I learned of it all those years later. I cherish those photos, even if I can't bear to view them.

My parents are buried in a town that’s a three-hour drive from my home in Virginia. The first year after they died, I visited their graves every time I was in the area, several times a year. I haven’t been to the cemetery in years, and that’s sad. Why do we invest emotionally and financially in burying the dead and marking their resting places and then never visit the memorials we create and pay for? Does closure mean walking away and never coming back?

Maybe my experience isn’t typical. Do any of you regularly visit the graves of loved ones and relatives? Do you bring your children? Is there a ritual or tradition associated with those visits?

October 31, 2006