I'll Be Seeing You
I spent some of a Saturday afternoon at the cemetery, pulling weeds and cleaning up the graves of the people with whom I spent the first 18 years of my life. The baby tears were growing over the plaques, the deer had been trimming the fuchsia, and the forget-me-nots were getting leggy.
As I stood up and read the plaques and looked at the ceramic photo set into the bench across the path, I wondered again where they are now. When you know somebody for 50 years it’s a hard habit to break: I still hear and see them, if only in my mind’s eye and ear. Sometimes it seems, now that they’re all dead, if all the scenes and memories we shared were really just a figment of my imagination. How do you prove these actions and conversations really took place when the only other people who saw and heard them are gone? How real and tangible are things like memories, conversations, or even relationships?
My mom’s paintings, my dad’s watch, the butcher block that used to be in my brother’s kitchen all argue they WERE here, and they had lives and impacted my life and the lives of others, living and dead. They lived and loved, created and destroyed, lived 46 years, or 73, or 82, but now all that’s left are these pictures and words, and an ever-shrinking number of memories (mine and others) in the lives they helped to shape. That’s why I’m here at the cemetery cleaning up: As long as I’m alive I’ll feel obligated to keep these words and pictures from being obliterated by nature in an attempt to keep them connected to this world.
I understand now much better why people need to believe in heaven or some sort of afterlife. Something in our souls has trouble thinking of people who were so alive and important to us just being gone. Outside of our hearts they have no more substance than a passing cloud or a breath of wind. I try to imagine what they would be thinking if they were standing here looking down at my grave. Would they believe that we would meet again? Would they laugh at some joke we’d shared 30 years ago? Bristle at an argument that took place in 1966?
I’m not a very religious person, so I don’t see us all getting back together and talking about where we’ve been or what we’ve thought since we last saw each other. On the other hand, that’s one of the few things I’d be very glad to be proved wrong about.
Comments
My mother said the thing that kept her mother going after her father died was knowing they would be reunited in Heaven as they were so in love.
I think my mother hangs in there due to the dread of being reunited with my dad.
This afterlife business in tricky indeed.
Posted by: Robb Willis | June 20, 2006 08:59 PM