When Our Dead Disappear

“Hand me the ice scraper,” I asked my son as I knelt over my father’s gravestone. Using a sharp piece of plastic from the dollar bins, I chipped off the ice and snow that covered what was left of my father’s earthly presence. The boys each laid a flower on his stone and we spent a moment staring down at a man they remember little and I remember intimately. It’s been almost 11 years since his passing and we’re pausing to visit him before we drive home after a Thanksgiving weekend visiting my mother and the home my parents and I once shared.

I paused to take a picture. It’s a beautiful late winter morning in Missoula, MT. Dad is interred at the top of a hill where he’d have an excellent view of Mt. Sentinel and the entire Missoula Valley if only he’d sit up. Perhaps it’s best he doesn’t.

“I checked on Dad. He’s still in the same place we left him,” I wrote in a text to my siblings with the pictures attached. Everyone loves a little dark humor. My dad did too, until his final years. When we were children, the Tooth Fairy would leave us a rhyming poem along with a toy in exchange for our tooth. Dad was the author of those poems, and Mother did the penmanship. The last poem I received from the Tooth Fairy was when I was 22 and my wisdom teeth were removed. Dad e-mailed it to my then-boyfriend who slipped it under my pillow as I drooled in my drugged sleep.

Decades later, Dad had a testicle removed due to his cancer. Riffing on what I thought was established tradition whenever a body part was removed, I wrote him a rhyming poem from the Testicle Fairy and left him some candy.

He was not amused.

Apparently here’s a fine line between dark and tacky that I have yet to appreciate. I still think it was funny but maybe someone should check in with me when my body parts get lopped off and see how I feel then.

The boys returned to the warm car and my Chucks crunched on the snow as I walked to a cluster of columbaria across the cemetery where interred were the cremains of a college friend who died 30 years ago. As I approached, I noted the same faded and weathered nylon flowers left by others, the same neat array of markers organized in perfect lines with perfect space. I went to a familiar location only to find…a blank spot.

His marker was gone.

I circled the four columbaria with the only logical thought, that I had shockingly misremembered his location. Like an accountant reading a spreadsheet, my eyes carefully scanned each column and row of each side of every columbarium. His name wasn’t listed. I scrabbled in the snow with the toe of my Chucks looking for a marker that might have fallen off, but there was none. I repeated these actions a second and then a third time.

He was truly not there.

Before I made it back to the car, I left a ridiculous voice mail with the cemetery staff. “Hi, I’m calling to check on one of your…” What do I call an interred dead person? Guest? Corpse? Box o’ ashes? “…residents. He’s not where I last saw him. You know what I mean. Please call me back.”

This gnawed at me the 12-hour drive home. We have so many mechanisms to not lose things. We put AirTags in our luggage and leashes on our pets and toddlers. We pay for barcoded stickers when we ship packages and install cameras at our own homes. We leverage the habit of putting our shoes and keys in the same place every time we enter the house so we don’t have to look for them later. If there’s one thing in life we should be able to count on, it’s that once we plant our dead, their location should not change.

Monday brought some answers. “Your friend’s ashes were disinterred and relocated. Normally this happens at family request but we do not have any information to share. Please call his family.”

Trying to contact my friend’s family effort occupied my morning. Do you know what it’s like to try to find a landline phone number for an 84-yr-old widowed woman who had probably remarried and I’d last seen 30 years ago when I was 14? I played Six Degrees of My Friend’s Mother trying to find acquaintances who knew acquaintances only to learn that a surprising number of middle-aged people from my adolescence are now dead. Apparently they all got older while I stayed the same.

Mid-day a lead paid off and my phone lit up with a Montana area code. “Hello?” said a slightly creaky voice. “I’m calling you back. Are you looking for my son?”

I’m not a weeper but I choked as I introduced myself. “Hi-this-is-Timberly-and-I-knew-your-son-30-years-ago-and-I’ve-visited-his-grave-all-these-years-but-this-weekend-he-was-gone-and-can-you-please-tell-me-where-he-is?”

No, that doesn’t sound crazy at all.

She remembered me, or said she did and we talked for the better part of an hour. Apparently 1992 was an eventful year for her. After the death of her son, she remarried as I’d remembered and she had 30 happy years with her second husband until he died recently. He was entitled to eternal rest in a veteran’s cemetery. Thanks to my friend’s time in the Army before college, he had the same privilege, so she had him relocated to be next to her husband. Her actions felt familiar to me but I couldn’t place the feeling until writing this now. My friend’s mother is nesting, but the end-of-life version. Instead of what pregnant women do before they birth, she is preparing for her resting place with her family.

She asked what life had brought me in this time.

“I graduated and went to graduate school in Arizona for music. Then I married and got another master’s degree in business. We had two children who are now 16 and 18. My dad died a few years ago and my husband and I divorced but we just visited Missoula for Thanksgiving to see my mom who’s still there.”

Fewer than 60 words summarize the last 30 years of my life. It seemed like I should have more to show for myself.

It occurs to me that at 44, I’m now more than old enough to be the mother of my friend as I knew him in 1992. Yet when I think about him, I’m emotionally an ungainly teenager with the effusive grief of someone who lost a wonderful friend in a tragic way. I’m also adult enough to realize that inextricably bound in this grief is a host of related sadness: My dad’s death, challenging family relationships, a rootless and awkward childhood with few friends. My friend’s death isn’t only the loss of his life but representative of unfulfilled possibility, both for him and, separately, for me.

We ended with her giving me the address for the cemetery where I can find my friend. Next time I visit Missoula, I will look for him and take flowers as I have periodically for decades. When his mother’s plaque joins his, I’ll bring flowers for her, too.

And I’ll tell you one more thing: I am doubling down on keeping track of my dad from this point forward.

 

There Are Days [Thoughts]

There are days.

There are days when you’ll be cut off in traffic and when you’ll get a ticket because of the photo radar system. Chances are, it’ll be at the intersection you never, ever, ever run except for that one day when you were just a little too preoccupied and you didn’t gun it or break it in time. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll get twice of those in the same week (but different intersections, of course, because you’re not stupid).

There are days when you realize you’re unhappy and missing out on life’s best moment but you have to because you’re a slave to a paycheck.

There are days when you look at your most important relationship and realize, “There’s nothing wrong — but there’s everything wrong.”

 

Two Peas in a Pod [Stories]

Officiant:

Good afternoon, friends. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to everyone coming out on this chilly and wet March day to celebrate the life that was Tom Jaeger. If you haven’t been to the Everlasting Gardens of Perpetual Sunset Cemetery and Crematorium before, I encourage you after the services are done to visit our facilities inside where you can enjoy complimentary donuts and coffee as well as free WiFi. There’s a spot for the kiddos to run around, too, as well as information about purchasing memberships in our floral service where, for a nominal fee, we will put flowers on your beloved’s grave on dates of your choosing. It’s a really great service, particularly for those of you who are from out of town and can’t visit often. But I digress.

We are here to honor Tom, a man who has touched many through his kindness and charitable deeds and lived in this community for more than 20 years. Does anyone know if more people are coming? No? Just us? Well, okay, then, we should get started. There’s another service after this one.

I’d like to hand this over to Raoul, Tom’s son, who will begin the memorial. Raoul?

 

Never Tear Us Apart [Memoir]

I don’t know when girls start to notice boys but I started my career of boy crushing early. Some say daddy is a girl’s first love but not with me. It was Mr. Rogers. I woke up to that man almost every morning and loved him with a sexless passion that defines a little girl’s first romance with a television character. Once, Lynn and Lynette were talking in the living room about the boys they liked. Eager to get in on the conversation with the girls 12 and 14 years older, I chimed in, “but what about Fred?”

 

The Curious Case of the Can of Buttons [Stories]

The coffee can gleamed dully in the corner of the closet. Above it were family treasures. Below were the litre bottles of Jack Daniels, Smirnoff, Beefeater. On either side were jars filled with wheat pennies, dimes minted before 1965, international coinage. The can was more interesting, filled to the brim with buttons.

Dad harvested buttons from everything, like his mother before him, saved for a day (you never know when) a button might be needed. I can’t recall a single flyaway button incident the entire time Grandma lived with us. The little ones wore zippers and elastic and Grandma preventatively reinforced the buttons on everyone else’s clothes. Flyaway buttons? That’d never happen, not on her watch.

Clothes failed before the buttons did and when they did, Grandma would snip the buttons off for later use. She died in 1989, and Dad took up her habit. There’s a Frog and Toad story about a lost button. Toad’s lost his and Frog scours high and low for one to match. Why didn’t Frog ever call my dad? We had buttons to spare.

 

All Summer in a Day [Memoir]

Mother dropped a thin brochure over the book I was reading.

“What’s this?”

“Dad and I were talking about you taking classes at the university with me. There’s a program for kids like you.”

“Kids like me? What kind of kids?”

“Precocious kids.”

I must have looked bewildered. “What does precocious mean?”

 

Let’s Try It

When Dad passed away, his archives became available to us. Years of records, a file folder on every child, every property, every pet, every business. Most of my folders included drawings, birthday cards, the occasional award or picture but a fair chunk was dedicated to the history of my education, non-traditional that it was.

I was a parenting experiment. All children before me attended some form of traditional schooling, public or private, skipping a grade here or there. Raoul and Linda both started college at 16 but otherwise the older seven kids were within the range of common. My parents decided to buck the industrial schooling system entirely with me: Total home education. What this meant in the 1980s is that once a year I would go to the local elementary school for a few hours a day one week a year to participate in standardized tests. Providing I performed at or above grade level, the state would allow us to continue home education.

This once-a-year testing event was my only contact with children who didn’t share my genetic makeup. All those experiences you may not even register as experiences were new to me.

The first day of third grade assessment, my mother dropped me off at Mountain View with Miss Fredericks. Mother pressed some money into my hand. “You’ll need this for lunch. Just follow the other kids.”

 

Heavy Medal

I’m a committed non-collector. That’s all you need to know about me and my willpower.

But I want to collect, so badly. Disney pins, stamps, coins, letters, postcards, stickers, crushed flowers, spices, pictures, dolls, pieces of lint that look like presidents (that’s a joke…or is it?). The only thing that might make me happier than collecting is organizing the collection into some kind of obscure taxonomy that would make sense to only the most analytical.  Collecting would give me control to create order. It would make me the Larry Page and Sergey Brin of my own little domain.

Speaking of organization, here’s a true story: In my teens, I used to make mix CDs and tapes for my friends. Nothing special there. Prehistoric cave man Grog probably did this for his long-haired Grettahilda using teeth rammed into a barrel and yak whiskers for percussion implements to make a music box filled with “Early Man’s Greatest Hits.” But for me, the art wasn’t just in the selection of songs but in their arrangement. Each song had to be connected to the next in some very precise way. Options included:

 

It Goes On

I lost my first tooth March 17, 1984. I have no memory of that event, but I don’t need to. Dad made note of it for me.

Thanks to Dad, I know when every centimeter of gum released its toothy bounty. I know the exact dates I was hospitalized, every music performance and who in the family attended, every road trip taken until I was 19. He logged his activities and those of whom he was around for every day of his life from January 3, 1974 until February 21, 2012. One page a day, one pad a month, every month. Filed away in chronological order, more than 450 notepads. The aggregation of an old man’s life and of those he touched.

 

One Moment in Time

In 1990, I was 12 years old. But forget that. It’s not really important. In 1990, Ghost was the big movie, the band Warrant released “Cherry Pie,” the chic wore massive hoop earrings and Converse all-stars, Cheers and The Golden Girls were popular, The Young and the Restless was the soap to watch, and slap bracelets were huge. Forget that, too. Not only is it not important but I had to look all that up. I don’t know it first-hand because I was a home-schooled kid who didn’t know anyone and had just relocated across the country with a mother and dad old enough to be my grandparents.

I don’t know how other kids feel about moving but I hated it. Then I loved it. Then I hated it again. Loved it. Hated it. Loved it. The cycles continued but eventually the periods of “loving it” lasted longer and the periods of “hating it” were relegated to days when the pollen count was high. Eventually what pushed me more into the “loving it” zone was the opportunity to pursue two interests: reading historical fiction and biographies side-by-side and hanging out in the jacuzzi at the new house, simultaneously.