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The Grave Plots Lie Fallow, For The Nonce

The two cemetery plots lie fallow in the lawn-like sward of St. Joseph’s Catholic Cemetery in my native city of Warren, some 70 miles northwest of DuBois.

I glanced at them last week.

“Not just yet, you (expletive),” I muttered. I anthropomorphize in cemeteries, talking to trees or to tombstones bearing the names of people I once knew. These days, I know more names of people interred in that cemetery than I do while walking downtown.

This specific expletive was directed toward the bladder cancer that threatens my insides despite surgery and immunotherapy.

As I cussed, I smirked in wry amusement at what Mom would have said while she whopped me upside the head for using such language in a sacred cemetery.

For 46 years, from 1956 when Dad died until 2002 when Mom died, Mom and I made that trip each year up a shoulder of the hillside framing the Allegheny River. For Mom, Dad’s death had been triple agony; he died unexpectedly of a stroke at age 39; he died on Feb. 14, which is Valentine’s Day; and Feb. 14 was her birthday.

That first year, when she and I clumsily dug a flowerbed in front of a tombstone, Mom sobbed audibly but kept on.

“Keeping on” was something Mom did well.

The years slid into decades. Mom gradually wore down, yielding the spade and trowel to me but supervising every placement, the Dusky Miller “spike,” the eight geraniums, the six or eight blue ageratums, the yellow marigolds, the bright pansies.

How could such abundance fit into the allowable small circular flowerbed?

It didn’t.

By July, we had a jungle, despite bimonthly trips to “deadhead” the withered blooms. Mom liked it that way, riotous surfeit of colors.

Early on, Mom issued her order.

“You do this,” Mom said. “Every year, you do this.

“Or,” she would say, grinning as she reached to tweak my ear or grab a handful of my hair, “I’ll haunt you! I swear I will!”

It became a joke, but one to be taken seriously. In cemeteries be spirits. You say what you will. To each his own. I won’t argue. But spirits there are. Inn cemeteries they can be found.

Looking back now, from 1956-2018, 62 long years, I don’t think I have missed going to the cemetery to plant those flowers for parents or the adjoining graves of grandsons Adam, three months, and Ian, seven years.

I plant other flowers. I buzz the string trimmer along the edges of other tombstones, marking extended family, co-workers, neighbors. It is small enough acknowledgement of bonds shared, of destinies impending.

In the years during and following World War II and the Korean War, whole families went to the Catholic “field mass,” held outdoors if weather permitted. Afterward, we trudged up the hill to our loved ones’ plots, being neighborly passers-by to the largely ethnic community drawn there by sorrow, loss and sadness, seeking some connectedness.

Traditions wither.

My grown children try to help me keep the promise as age and that expletive-described disease slow me down. But most live at a distance. They have jobs and other family obligations of their own. To them, my vividly remembered Uncle Tim Bonavita or Grandma Maria Critelli are stiff-standing photos in faded albums, understandably so. Uncle Tim died in 1954. Grandma died earlier, in 1951. Those who were persons to me have become curios to them.

The connectedness fades in the third and fourth generation.

So do the traditions.

I, or we, have owned at least one vacant cemetery lot since 1956, when Mom bought several in the year of Dad’s death. Over the decades, family members’ remains filled those plots.

So I bought the two new lots along the wood line, perhaps 100 yards from the cluster of close family, yet within acceptable distance.

In earlier years, I automatically assumed that I would be buried there.

Now, though, the connectedness is not so strong. I have lived away from Warren for almost 30 years, with roots sunk into DuBois and Brookville.

Besides, I’ll be dead.

I will have no use for this $4.50 worth of flesh ($3.50 for the skin and another $1 for the rest) the calculations courtesy of the Mayo Clinic.

I find, to my surprise and bemusement, that I no longer care about having a viewing, a church service, a solemn lowering of a casket into the ground.

I still see value in ritual, especially when death comes unexpectedly and out of cycle, to children or young adults. Ritual gatherings ease the pain and start us toward closure.

But for used-up geezers such me, cremation makes more sense than earth burial, at least from a land-use standpoint. My wife recently discovered that if one gets a death certificate, one could just dig a hole on one’s land and stuff the dearly departed into it. We have 27 acres, surely more than the minimum.

Stuffed into a hole, presumably folded to conserve space?

Perhaps.

As each year passes, the “where” and “how” of laying to rest interest me less and less.

I do remain intensely focused on the “when.”

“Not just yet, you (expletive).”

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net

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