Memorial Day, 1990

Originally published in The Camden Chronicle, June 6, 1990


We walked, the woman I consort with and I, among the fresh cut flowers and small American flags waving every so slightly in the light breeze. Memorial Day 1990. While reading the names and dates on the headstones, the silence in the cemetery reminds me of an outdoor library with each deceased person's history given in short bursts.

As we approached the grave we came to honor, the consort held back a little. The grave is not fresh; it is near a small river now muddy and swollen with spring rains. Grandpa would have liked this place where he has been placed for all eternity. You see, his boyhood home was in the hills of North Carolina and, like thousands of migrants from the hilly southeastern United States to the frozen North, he never quite made peace with the floor-flat Great Lakes terrain.

This is one of those post-war cemeteries that doesn't permit above ground memorials, only flat ground level stones are used. Grandpa's says, "Born 1902. Died 1988." That, along with his name, is all that is there. It explains nothing about the times he lived through, of the worlds he conquered, small and insignificant as they might seem. As the poet pointed out, each man is a general, his family is his army and in the war of subsistence, to rise above is to conquer and to build is to gain. He built, he conquered, and he gained. Because he was here, the woodpile is a little higher.

We moved, talking quietly, along the path, a narrow road, to another part of the cemetery and to another grave we came to honor. As we approached the maple tree and the small plot of ground burned so painfully in our memories, our conversation ceased, our thoughts busy un-jumbling each other. Here the dates on the headstone were "1964-1968."  Our littlest, killed in a tragic accident twenty-two years ago. Some things never change. The grab in the throat and the kick in the stomach are just as real as the day we laid her here.

Someone had visited a nearby grave earlier in the day and had too many flowers to fill the vase of their loved one. They lovingly placed them in the vase of the grave we came to visit. We arranged the flowers we brought along side the ones already there, silently thanking the unknown donor for their kindness. We left.

We don't come here often or stay long when we do. Some loves will last forever and some pains are too much for a mortal man to bear.

Clyde McKinley Cornett (1902-1988) and Janice Elaine Parker (1964-1968),
October 1967