Maggie's Farm

Father's family has four generations buried in a lovely old small town cemetery, casually tended by the church-related cemetery association.

Mother's father was a profane, anticlerical old cuss, his devout wife didn't feel right burying his remains in any local church cemeteries given all the bridges he burned, so she bought plots in a local commercial cemetery for the two of them, and other plots for their children, including my mother.

It's a blank field in a commercial strip midway between the two largest towns in the area, near the shopping mall, no less. No headstones, they only allow flat markers so they don't slow down the quick mowing teams, and they always try to sell families some extra cost junk services. Grandmother joined him there when she passed, as my mother's brother. The family hates to visit this featureless, commercialized "memorial park".

Sadly, when Father passed, Mother felt compelled to make use of the spaces there for his ashes, and eventually for her own at the end of her life. They both specified cremation, the older generations did the traditional embalming and burial.

Even Mother never visits Father's gravesite, and my sisters have never been back since the funeral, though we all put flowers on the old gravesites in the small town cemetery.

I suppose it doesn't really matter, but these circumstances broke the chain of family connections the surviving generations continue to feel at the old, traditional cemetery. It couldn't possibly matter to the deceased, but those they left behind have less to pull them together, more to scatter apart.