Family Plot October
I'm digging at my father's grave, my mother holding the rusty mums she's carried here to make a little garden before the first frost. Three years today, and the grass is a damp brown rectangle over his cryptic body that's guarded by earth from my more morbid speculations. Perpetual care's contracted out here, so no one's responsible for the dried-out tap, the graveyard's shameless posture of neglect, certainly not this pair of purposeful mourners with trowels and sturdy annuals we've chosen for their profusions of unopened buds.
I'm not good at this, thudding my shovel at stones, setting pots in the ground off-center. Alone, I'd plant a little dogwood, a Japanese drift of flowing branch above his name, but my mother sees this as her future home and wants, as usual, something else, whatever's harder to nurture.
I'll never lie here. I don't want anyone to stand, icy-handed, imagining my ruined body. My father liked so much to laugh—would he enjoy his clumsy girl, hacking away at clumps of sod, or his wife's sensible blue shoes sinking in mud?
It doesn't matter. I can't even say if he or I believed in God, or in any kind of hereafter. . . .
A drizzle mists the raw new hole, mists the one white rose from my table, and the pebble I place on his headstone like a good Orthodox daughter leaving a memorial relic as if it were a talisman of devotion that nothing—no eternities of neglect by myself or others, no drought or blight or storm or holocaust—could erode.
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