When I was 16 years old, my father’s mother, whom we called Meemaw, gave up the ghost. We all flew down to Fort Worth, where, per her wishes, my dad hosted a wake filled with live music, stiff cocktails, and loose stories. (Meemaw was, among other things, a former vaudeville performer and the sister of a legendary jazz drummer.)
The next morning, we drove to the cemetery. In the surreal haze of my grief-softened, hangover-warped brain, the place struck me as bleak and strange and sad, but not in a gothic or gloomy way. It billed itself as a “garden of memories,” but upon entering, I saw there was nothing gardenlike about it. It was essentially one huge lawn, composed of scratchy, heat-tolerant Texas grasses, like the upper surface of an enormous kitchen sponge. Here and there, far from Meemaw’s grave, a few small trees attempted, unsuccessfully, to quell the rage of a Texas sun. The only flowers I saw were made of plastic, and the only animals, other than us, were flies.
The day turned out to be a fiasco, in a darkly comedic way that my grandmother, who was an inveterate smartass, would probably have appreciated. First the florist failed to arrive, so there were no flowers. Then, looking over the headstone, my sister Alexis noticed that someone had gotten the date wrong. It said, erroneously, that Meemaw had died at the age of 95, rather than 85. There was some discussion that day of having it fixed, but it was ultimately deemed too much trouble. The error was written, as they say, in stone.
At the site of Meemaw’s grave, each of us read a short letter we had composed, telling her how much we loved her and how deeply we would miss her. Then we placed the letters inside the grave. While we went about this solemn little ritual, the gravedigger, an off-puttingly upbeat guy in his thirties, stood off to the side, watching us with evident curiosity.
After we had all finished, he spoke up.
“Now I know it’s not really my place, but I had a suggestion for y’all,” the chipper gravedigger said. “I’ve got some Ziploc bags there in my truck. What if you were to put the letters in them Ziplocs, and that way, if the young one there”—and here, he pointed to me—“ever wants to come back with kids of his own one day and read these letters again, they’d still be intact.”
My dad, who had inherited his mother’s preternaturally razory wit, thought this suggestion over for a moment, then replied: “When my mother went to the grocery store, she always chose paper over plastic. So I think we’ll just stick with that.”
At the time, what struck me as farcical about this suggestion was the notion that I would one day want to return here, kids in tow, to dig up my own grandmother’s grave. (One can only imagine the stares this would draw from the gentle people of Fort Worth.) But now, with the benefit of two decades of hindsight and a lot of time spent thinking about land and human bodies and how the two commingle, what seems even more absurd to me is the idea that I—or anyone, really—would ever want to visit that hot, dead, rot-resistant landscape ever again.
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