a reflection

when you have not been to a cemetary in several years, and you go to your mother's gravesite after so much time has passed, emotion comes upon you like a stranger accosting you on the street.

you drive to rose hills tentatively, not knowing the route exactly but knowing the offramp and that there will be signs to guide you. you remember vaguely that it's not far from the main front gate to your mother's grave-she is up and to the left. just stay left you tell yourself and you will certainly find it.

you pick up some flowers to lay there wondering how long it has been since flowers graced her stone.

you recall how you actually went to visit the grave often back in the early '90s, when you returned from serving in the military abroad and your life was rudderless. you were unemployed and you could not afford your car. eventually you had no place to live, your car was repossessed, you saw yourself where the road diverges. one path lead to drugs and self-destruction. you could see yourself embracing some of the kind-hearted but misguided people you met at reggae concerts all over southern california, delving into drugs with them, crashing where they crashed, posing as the heart and soul of rastafari.

you had these thoughts as you sat their atop your mother's grave. it was 1991 and '92 and you went there every couple of weeks because it was peaceful and you felt solitary there. you felt alive, even if the entire world found you inconsequential. here you felt things and you were there and people could see you and you could see them and you borrowed flowers from other graves because you could not afford them and you set them there for your mom who seemed to be the only person who listened to you back then.

the other road, the one you chose, involved doing just enough begging of your family and friends to get by, hoping to find yourself in a different place, somewhere on your feet down the road somewhere. you moved back in with your dad and his new wife. you asked a best friend if you could sleep on the floor of his living room. you hated the asking and you inwardly railed against a perceived vacuum of generosity that occurred, even though your friends and relatives came through and gave to you.

you finally got a job and you asked for favors from the manager who was kind to you because she loved you in a way. and lo, two or three years went by and you did find yourself elsewhere and elsewhere was better. you had not been the active take charge of your life type but you had made conscious efforts to do well at whatever you did and to try to improve yourself along the way by ingesting the classic novels and learning new skills.

you worked it out right there, at fir lawn.

on this day you grab flowers down the street on your way into the park. you stop to talk to the guy about directions just because you know it is all about staying left, and you have a feel for how far up it is but you can imagine walking around a few rows off and feeling like you might not even be on the right lawn. so you say her name to the man and he types it into his computer and he gets the spelling right and her name pops right up along with the phrase on her stone, "his living stone." the man says it out loud, "his living stone," he says. "oh, that's very nice," he adds generously. you turn immediately and nearly run into the man who walked in behind you without you realizing it. you scuffle by, out the door, and you grab your emotions with a stranglehold because it feels oddly discomfiting to lose your composure in public.

you get back to the solitude of your car, to the flowers there on the floor of the passenger seat, to the keys. you drive up cautiously because a sheriff passed you in the opposite direction and you wonder if he would bust anyone up here for a fix-it ticket, or expired registration, or driving on the wrong side of the road even.

you park and you walk directly toward the grave. you glance around a bit, only slightly confused then you seemingly turn around, look down, and there she is. or, rather, there is her stone. "his living stone." sure enough. it is still a classy looking stone. 'his living stone' was a reference from the book of acts, you think you recall. something about jesus being called the living stone, the rock the church is built on or some such thing. but the stone is actually living in you. you remember clearly how good your dad felt about that phrase on her stone. the imagery of the church as the bride of christ compared favorably with him and he imagined his bride and how special that relationship had been.

it must have been agonizing for him to even imagine his life going forward without her; the person who had loved him unconditionally since the day he became a man. you remember the tenderness present in his grief. gone was the guy who got mad because as teenagers you were exposed to the secular world and wanted to partake. he admonished you to avoid it, stomping around and yelling as if... gone was the macho sports-oriented guy. here was the most honesty you had ever known from him. his period of mourning, what you saw of it, was the shining moment of his fatherhood, the humble, honest and giving father setting a deft example of how to conduct oneself in a real-life situation.

you pull the flowers from one another and you spread them on her grave, below the letters. you have a realization tears are running down your face. your reaction is innate and unconscious. actively you think of how she was like a peer to you in many ways, the strife between you was honest and childlike, devoid of any structured systems or philosophies-it was just two humans conflicting without pretense.

she was, of course, your mother. since you were 11, anyway. your dad was your uncle because his sister, your mother, was unable to care for you. you had two moms, really.

further down somewhere you know she represents innocence. she represents a time before you knew ultimate pains, perhaps before you could have known ultimate joys. the absence of pain can be an intoxicating memory, you think.

you glance over at her father's grave, unadorned and you borrow some of her flowers to put on his stone. here was the embodiment of kindness. he played steel guitar and the organ for you as if he had been playing it all his life, (which he had,) getting you to sing along to 'it's a small world.' you remember him, grey at the temples, a devout baptist of 6 feet and perhaps 4 inches.

that is when the focus changes for you. you realize it is about mortality, coming to grips with it for yourself, something you expect to be a life-long struggle, and being ready to speak to your children about it. your thought process exhibits a life of it's own, being born and innocent then maturing even unto death.

you drive home in silence, turning the volume on your liberal talk radio from zero to two only after 10 minutes. 30 or 40 seconds later you gently move it to four and you can begin to hear words. you repeat the intervals slowly arriving back to your life of keeping a stiff upper lip, back to the time when you do your work and prepare for what's next.