Together for Eternity

This was a punch in the gut that knocked the wind right out of me. I was standing in front of my father’s grave about a week after the ninth anniversary of his death. (Things get so busy in the summer, and really he would want his grandkids at the pool rather than hanging out at a cemetery.)

This particular cemetery is beautiful though, filled with saplings and a pond where geese alight and my little boys try to frolic and swim. (They do not require concrete and slides, only water.) There is a fantastic bridge and a path for the kids to walk. I am glad that they like to come here.

We have many people to visit: my brother-in-law and an aunt and uncle on my husband’s side. All buried within ten yards of my own father. But that’s a story for a different day.

This day we stood near my dad’s grave to say a special prayer. And I saw that he had new neighbors. Not sure how else to say that. Always seems odd to me that you spend eternity laying next to total strangers.

But when I saw the names on the grave next door, I lost my breath. Erin and Andrew, buried together in one grave immediately next to my dad. It came to me instantly, the most tragic of stories from several months ago.

She was a high school student pulling out of her driveway one morning on her way to school, the most mundane of tasks really, when she was broadsided by a car speeding down the road. She died instantly and her little brother survived only one night. Two lives snuffed out in an instant, and now their legacy was there at my feet.

Couldn’t help but burst into tears right there. My kids have seen me cry here before. But this time it was not for my dad and my kids and all we had lost. I didn’t have the heart to tell them how young grandpa’s new neighbors were.

I just continued to stare at the names on the tiny crosses, graves too new for names etched in stone. I couldn’t wrap my brain around this. Not only the grievous unfairness of the dead children, but the fact that they were buried here, at least an hour from where they lived, and of all places, directly next to my dad.

And as I stand here, I grieve for their mother, too. I wonder if she comes to sob for her children as I come to lament my father. And I wonder if she imagines who is lying beside her children, so quiet in the earth like that which he gardened. And he with no grandchildren and they without their mother. Maybe, just maybe, there is symmetry of comfort in the great beyond.

My kids have long-since run to chase after butterflies. And I dry my tears. And I hope she knows what a great, gentle man lies next to her precious children for eternity. And if somehow that could help.