Just Off Main Street: Roast in the Graveyard

Most people tend to spend their summers relaxing at beaches or pools, at lake cottages or campgrounds. My family, on the other hand, spent a lot of time at cemeteries. 

Every year it starts with bringing Easter lilies in the spring, followed by visits on Memorial Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and the 4th of July, the latter being both my grandmother’s birthday and the yahrzeit of one of her sons, my Uncle Louie. Yahrzeit is a Yiddish word that means the anniversary of one’s death. I’m not Jewish, but I love this word. And I use it a lot because my mother does not approve of the alternative “deathiversary.”

I have memories of many a sweltering Independence Day spent at the cemetery, helping my mom fill watering cans and trimming the grass with those scissor-like clippers.

These trips were such a summer event for us that we even have home movies of us running around the cemetery. Some people have movies of their families frolicking in the water or at barbeques with faces covered in s’mores. Me, I have movies of my siblings and I kneeling graveside in our red, white and blue outfits and babushkas.

At least we were done with our cemetery obligations for the most part by July 4. Then we’d still have the rest of the summer to do fun stuff.  Like visit relatives in Kankakee and play with rusty nails in their basement.

But all that changed when my father passed away last year. On August 16. I think he was taking one last shot at my mother, and he got her good. They somehow found a way to bicker into my father’s afterlife, with my mother proclaiming that “August is a stupid month to die.  Who dies in August?” 

I futilely pointed out that probably lots of people die in August, maybe even just as many as in any other month. Didn’t lots of celebrities die in August? Marilyn Monroe? Elvis Presley? She wasn’t having any of it, and just may have been ever so slightly projecting her grief onto the matter of the timing of my father’s death.

In preparation for this article, I finally Googled some celebrities to verify my recollections of their deaths.

“Hey Mom, guess when Elvis died?”

“When?”

“August 16!”

“Figures.”

I have no idea what that means.

I tried to indoctrinate my daughter into our family tradition over Memorial Day, but she somehow failed to see the fun in it. She loves running water more than anything, but the cemetery spigot wasn’t doing it for her.

And when she started grabbing random pinwheels and artificial flowers and literally dancing on people’s graves, I figured cemeteries and autism don’t mix. Yep, it must be the autism. I know it can’t be that childhood and cemeteries don’t mix. Because clearly these experiences have left me unscathed.

I’m not sure if this is autism or typical for any child, but in nearly a year my daughter has yet to mention her grandfather or where he’s gotten to. At the cemetery, she had absolutely no connection to the graves and the headstones and what they meant. This is partially because we didn’t involve her much in the wake and funeral, but also because she is so literal and can be very “out of sight, out of mind.” I guess in her mind Elvis has left the building for good.

So I know where my daughter won’t be on August 16. But I know where my mother and I will be. And I don’t need Tom Skilling or the Farmer’s Almanac to tell me that it will be 112 degrees in the shade.  If there was any shade.