Memorial Day is a cemetery’s Christmas with its festive décor and visits from family. It’s the one time of year when we openly pay tribute to the burial grounds of generations past.
Every Memorial Day, I visit the cemetery in Brooklyn, Iowa. Every loved one I’ve lost resides for eternity in the Brooklyn Memorial Cemetery, with its gravel pathway at the edge of town. To the right of the road is the old section, with its tall ornate monuments that seem to reach for the heavens. Most of the gravestones are simple, like those a child would draw, a half moon jutting from the dirt. Decades and centuries of sun, wind, and snow have erased most of the etchings, indiscernible letters marking ancient graves. To the left is the newer side, its expansion, because people can’t seem to quit dying.
A cemetery on Memorial Day advertises the upcoming holiday like a storefront window after Thanksgiving: blobs of pinks, reds, purples, and yellows can be seen from the highway, the cemetery road lined with American flags. The colors take the shapes of flowers as you get closer, most of them artificial, that adorn monuments, hang from shepherd’s hooks, or sprout from the ground. The newer side of the cemetery is decked out for its holiday, while the old side sits mostly naked, its family having died out through the years, with no one to decorate it for the holiday.
There’s something comforting in a decorated cemetery on Memorial Day—like the dead matter even though we no longer see them. Thomas Hardy wrote a poem called “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?” about our deceased loved ones with easily forgotten graves as life moves on. Life moved much slower in 1913, but even then people had better things to do than worry about a loved one’s burial ground. But for those of us who make a point to stop by and visit on the designated United States’ day of remembrance, bearing gifts of flowers, there’s a peace and tranquility that you cannot find anywhere else.
My mother used to make all the cemetery flowers: for her parents, my dad’s parents, and their grandparents. I didn’t much understand it when I was younger, correlating a cemetery with horror movies, walking all the way around gravestones thinking if I walked over someone’s coffin, they would haunt me—or worse, stick their hand from beneath the dirt, grab my ankle, and drag me down into death with them. When we stood at my Grandma Connell’s grave, and then my Grandpa Johnson’s grave a few years later, I didn’t get it. I saw their names engraved on the stone, but they weren’t really down there, were they? Their skeletons might be, but their souls were elsewhere, right? I had no religious upbringing, so I only knew of a nebulous God that may or may not care about our daily conflicts, one whom some people took seriously and others didn’t. We were in the didn’t category.
By the time I was in college, I understood this visit to the cemetery better, although I chose not to participate, having more interesting things to do with my life. I watched my mother cut artificial flowers from their bushes and design beautiful arrangements tied together with ribbon. Lots of lavender for her mom, more reds and yellows for her father-in-law. She created bundles for people I knew not of, only a wayward picture or two of people I never met, but their photograph proved their existence, that just because I had never known them didn’t mean they weren’t part of other people’s memories.
When my mother died when I was 33, I took over her role as curator of Memorial Day décor.
I don’t know all of those she made flower bouquets for, but my list contained both sets of my grandparents, an aunt who died the year before my mom, and Bobby, the uncle who died when he was eight, one I never knew, but felt a kinship with because I too had scarlet fever, which had taken Bobby’s life when he was only eight. My flower designs looked more like bridesmaids’ bouquets than those for Memorial Day, but it was the thought that mattered. We used a metal rack to place on top of one set of grandparents, so I stabbed flower stems into green floral Styrofoam (and didn’t realize how many flowers one needed to cover it). My mother’s monument was huge—as a genealogist, she had designed her own, knowing the importance of a grave marker for anyone interested in tracing family lineage. I designed a spray that would run the length of it, usually selecting a different shade of pink of every year (although this year I used lavender). I learned over the years that adding a touch of something with glitter—like a bird, a butterfly, berries, or some funky pick—sparkled in the sun, which you could see from blocks away. Thinking the dead might be able to see such a sparkle, I add at least one glittery flower or bird into each bouquet.
Our trip to the cemetery isn’t quite over until we visit my dad’s pet cemetery—not like Stephen King’s—on a small section of land near his house. Enclosed in a black wrought iron fence with an archway over the gate sits the final resting place of our beloved family dog, a Norwegian elkhound named Elsa; my first pet as an adult, a Pomeranian named Ginger; and my recently deceased cat, a 14-year-old white cat named Kippy. My sister’s dog Savannah is also buried there. I make flowers for all of them as well. Dad made matching white crosses while I stuck glittery letters to spell out their names. Both Ginger and Kippy have a granite stone with their picture engraved on it.
Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day, a fitting name for a cemetery’s decadence during that last full weekend of May when we take the time to remember our loved ones—both human and animal. Such an archaic tradition has somehow survived our modern world, one in which we digitize everything, a world we seem to care more about via our tiny screens than the huge world we physically inhabit. Yet as I drive past cemeteries in town or on the highway and see all the pinwheels spinning in the breeze, the flags flapping beside gravestones, the flowers adding a kaleidoscope of radiant colors to a manicured green lawn, it feels me with content knowing that we haven’t forgotten those who are no longer with us despite our fast-paced world.
It makes me hopeful that someone will leave flowers on my grave on Memorial Day.