GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Last Tuesday I’d had a hard day at work. Not one of those days with fireworks and explosions, more the slow steady drip of dissallusionment as “little things” started to pile up. About a month earlier, someone had stolen a tip from me, and I had no way of finding out who. A few days before, I had noticed someone had ripped a recognition that I’d done a good job on a project off of the wall. And that afternoon my boss had sat down to talk to me about something that wasn’t my fault, but rather a disorganization on her part. I felt like going home, curling up in bed, and not getting up for a long time. When I got home, I felt like I needed a good long drive to shake out all of the wrinkles I felt on the inside. Usually when I feel that craving, I get on the highway between my first home and my second home—my mom’s hole-in-the-wall restaurant, but I had a feeling that drive wasn’t going to be near long enough. Then I had another idea.

You know how we all have things we were always “going” to do? We may have lived in St. Louis and never gone up the arch, or in Houston and never seen the NASA museum. When you grow up halfway between Nowhere and Off the Edge of the Map, there aren’t a lot of noteworthy things to do that anyone would recognize you never did. But for me there was. I’d lived on a farm for the second ten years of my life, a good hour or so away from where I live now. Down one of the long stretches of a country mile there was an old cemetery you could barely see from the road, just a blue doorframe tucked in among the row of orderly trees trimmed back by the city. If you looked hard, you could see the outline of tombstones in the shady clearing under the trees. I had always wanted to stop and see the names, read the dates, wonder who those people had been. But I had never been the one driving, and whomever I’d been riding with on any given day had always had somewhere to be.

Today, I had a license, a car of my own, and a need to drive without a destination. So I changed out of my work uniform into something more comfortable, pulled a stack of computer paper out of the printer, dug around until I found the stash of crayons, and then drove down to the corner to buy three dozen locally grown roses--if I was going to do this, I was going to do this right. Then I got in my car, rolled down the windows, and weaved my way in and out of post-Ike traffic until I got out on the old highway my family had burned up for years, driving to and from the city. The closer I got to Home the more I started scanning the treeline, not remembering precisely where the blue doorframe was, and afraid I would miss it. It was a strange feeling for me. I’m in the middle of six kids, so the idea of doing something alone that no one had done before me has always been a sensation I have loved flirting with, however small an experience. Besides, of all of the kids, I have done the least traveling. Between my older siblings and my younger ones, we’ve hit every coast, and even both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, I’ve always been the midland kid for some strange reason. While they’ve been from California to New York to Galveston, Texas: I’ve been to Arkansas . . . but then, so have they.

In recent weeks I have tried to sit on a craving to just start driving and figure out where I’m going when I get there. To drive across country, to see something, but I have had no idea where to go that would feel exciting enough to quench the thirst—or how to pay for the thirst of my gas tank. For now, all I could do was squint along the treeline for the marking of a cemetery full of strangers. Finally I saw it and pulled off to the side of the highway. I gathered up my crayons and paper in one hand, and my bunches of roses in the other. I was alone in the middle of nowhere in a place I’d never been before—it felt so good.

I walked up the steep incline and passed through the blue arch, only to discover that it wasn’t the true entrance into the cemetery. Walking a few more feet I unlatched the gate and stepped in among the stones. I set my bundles down for a moment and stood over the nearest stones. Two, modern-looking, tan, marbletop stones lying flat on the ground. At first I was struck by an imagined request by an anceint man or woman that must have requested, recently, to be buried in the family plot, but then I looked at the date of death for each of them: 1918 and 1948. Then a new possibility struck me. As I glanced around the little plot, reading a few stones with similar dates, but much more weather-beaten—someone must have returned to this old plot to replace the fading stones. These two were surrounded by ancient stones whose words and secrets were fading fast. I reached down to the grass where I’d left them and picked up a sheet of paper and a blue crayon. Holding the paper up to one of the nearest headstones, I began to rub the crayon over it back and forth, and slowly the words started to stand out white against the waxy smear. I saw a name, a set of dates, and an inscription. I continued this down the row of tombstones, making note of the ages at the time of death and any little details I could. Many were young, forties, fifties, sixties. One of the younger men had written below his dates, “Born in Alabama.” I wondered why this was important to be remembered by those that had carved his inscription.

As I moved on to a new row, the ages became even younger, I pushed the weeds, grass, and moist earth away from the base of one, small headstone and discovered a ten day old infant lay beneath, and had for over a hundred years. Moving on the next I read the name “Aline,” discovered by the dates she had only been five years old, and then beneath it lay the inscription faded by time and illuminated by my rubbing, “Darling we miss thee.” Beside her lay a four-year-old boy of nearly a hundred years. They had probably known each other briefly. He had the little poem that had touched me so deeply the day I had gone with my family to my mother’s old family graveyard—“Born on earth. Bloomed in heaven.” Beside him lay another infant, curving over her name--I could only guess had been Ida--were the words, “Gone but not forgotten.” I stood there for a moment more down than before I had made the drive and yet strangely uplifted. Here I was, a young woman who had driven past their resting places, walked the fields where they had once lived, grown up alongside them, returning fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty years after their deaths to remember them—Gone but not forgotten.

The last one on the end of the line of lost children was another marbel stone in the same fashion of those I had assumed to have been replaced, and I assumed it had been as well. It was small, about the size of both of my feet side by side, I guessed. It bore no name, no date, no inscription. One simple word—Daddy. Why? I yerned for some reason, some answer, some explanation, but the very lack of one made it beautiful, intimate—made me envious. Someday when I bury my father, I won’t call him daddy. I don’t call him daddy now. Who knows how long it will have been since I spoke to him last or he spoke to me. I assume I’ll be contacted, but where from?

I looked up. I had missed two towering headstones off in the corner of the graveyard. I knelt down beside the first. I had to use my crayons for this one. “Clemma Dean Kimler,” I read . . . she had died just before her twelth birthday. Beneath her dates, like a few of the children, she had a slightly varied form of the born and bloomed verse. I sat in silent respect for her. Remembering that I had been her age when modern research had saved my life with the insulin injection. What if undiagnosed diabetes had been what cut her life short?

The tombstone beside her was by far the most intricate of any I had seen. It was curved on top of a square base, but that wasn’t what struck me so much as the intricate and almost completely faded carvings almost filling the top of the curve. I did a rubbing to find lacy scrollwork surrounding a hand pointing upward as if to heaven. Beneath it in better defined cut stone was the name “Daisy” and then a recognition for the husband that had burried her. Beneath it near the base of the stone were rough ridges that I recognized had once been clearer words. I worked hard with corners of pre-used paper (I didn’t have any more) to get the jist of what was written there. Something about a happy spirit and a pure heart. She had been twenty two years old, only months older than me. I felt a strong connection to this woman, the creativity of the tombstone, the words of love written about her—she had been my age.
I got up and unbound the roses from their newspaper trappings and walked the graveyard once more, placing roses at the graves. I had wished so much I’d had enough to place one at every grave—even the ones whose stones had been so beaten by time there was nothing but a worn, broken rock marking the fact that someone lay beneath it, but I didn’t. The sheer wonder of it all thrilled me. The stories that I could only guess at, the fact that I would never know these people, and more quieting still—that they would never know me, the strange girl that walked among them now, decorating their graves. It made me wonder if anyone would ever do that when I was gone and everything about my personality had been lost by the world, perhaps by everyone—completely forgotten. What of the people who didn’t even have any words on their headstones, just inicials or nothing at all. I was still here wondering. The thought of that comforted me. I wondered who the children had bloomed to be. The parents that had lived their whole lives without them, seeing them again for the first time, fifty, sixty, seventy years later as another child, perhaps fifty or sixty years old themselves, buried and morned them. I wondered. I wondered. They were long gone but not forgotten.