Grief Revisited: Letting Go Of The Cemetery

A few days before our flight from NYC to Portland I had it on my calendar to pay a visit to the cemetery.

My family bought a plot of land in an empty cemetery decades ago. The first person to be buried there from our family was my grandpa, a man I only know by name, but whose death is felt across generations. At 27 years old, I’ve found myself staring at open-ended questions like, “What is death?” and “Why do we do this one thing after someone dies?” and answering them with statements like, “I don’t know, I’m just starting to define it for myself.”

There were traditions I inherited from my grandma and the generations that came before her that didn’t fit me like they had fit their conservative, Catholic upbringing. I’d outgrown them or never actually grown into them, depending on who you asked. The cemetery though was one that I’d taken up as my own.

Floating above my grandpa’s coffin is my mom’s and above hers is my grandma’s. Three different deaths that for me underscore how grief is meant to be defined in unique and subjective ways. With my grandpa, I feel borrowed grief because my memories with him are loaners. Tidbits of a man whose life and legacy trickle through pictures on credenzas in the last place he called home and vivid descriptions of his sewing machine from those he got to call grandchildren.