Memorial Day remembrance

When I was young, I used to go along with my mom to buy plants for the graves for Memorial Day. She’d pick up plants for everyone who couldn’t drive including her parents and her sister Muriel.

She’d drive all over the city of Lowell looking for just the right flowers. They were always geraniums. Always. She said that they were heartier than most flowers and didn’t need a lot of water.

We’d pick up my aunt and go to the Lowell Cemeteries where family was buried. I never understood how she remembered where all the graves were but she did. The three of us would get the flowers out of mom’s back seat and start our work.

First we would pull weeds around the graves whose markers lay flat in the ground. Their family never had the type of money to have the larger stones that stood upright. But they were a proud working-class Irish family nonetheless. It was important that the names on the grave markers be seen, though, since they were as important as anyone else in that cemetery.

We’d place the geraniums around the stones and stand back and look at our work. There were never tears. Not even once.

 “I’ll come back and get the geraniums in two weeks before the cemetery people remove them all,” Mom would say. “They should be okay without water for that long.”

One day when I was older I asked my mom why she went to so much trouble getting flowers for someone who wasn’t there to appreciate them.
“It’s a way of remembering them,” she said.
“Can’t you remember them at home?” I asked.
“It’s just not the same as coming here,” she replied.

I never really discussed it with her again. She continued to do the Memorial Day cemetery run up until about 3 years before her death. My aunt Muriel was gone at that point so my dad would go with her.

When mom was dying two years ago, she told me she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes spread with my dad’s when he was gone too.
“Where would you like them spread?” I asked her.
“Oh, I’ll leave that up to him. Just so long as we’re together,” she said, patting my hand.

So there’s no picking the right geranium for her now that she’s gone or driving all over the city of Lowell on Memorial Day weekend. Her ashes sit in my dad’s house, vacant now that he’s in a nursing home and we prepare to sell the house.

But I’ll remember her. Still. Without tears. And I’ll plant carefully-chosen geraniums this weekend in my yard as I’ve done for many years. I’ve always liked geraniums. They’re heartier than most flowers and don’t need a lot of water.