One by one, with each tombstone or grave marker I passed, my young mind, (7 or 8 years old), learned to make up stories of these dead people based on what I would read on their stones.

"Beloved Mother, Sister and Daughter", meant she was a mother, as this was all my mind would register, at first.

"1945-1971", meant she was probably a new mother. Then, as the stain of this knowledge crept into my brain, how sad I would become for her child, or worse, her children, her grieving parents, her uncles! Her aunts, her cousins! Her friends, her family! Her husband!! These thoughts would become apparent in my dramatic facial expressions.

"Sweetie-pie, don't be sad, they are in heaven, it's OK, they're with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit," my mother would sweetly say, making the sign of the cross with her hands. She did not know that at this time I was questioning the very existence of heaven, as well as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

"Rose Adrianne, look! It's a little girl! She died when she was a little girl!" My younger brother Alan said excitedly but his expression of marvel faded, as he was probably saddened by the shortness of this girl's life. His sadness was momentary, of course, being only 6 and all.

Ants crawled all over her marker, helping Alan to forget his sadness only to rise up in exaggerated amazement.

"Ewww!!"  He said, very loudly, then off he ran while I stood there trying to make sense of how this little girl could have died so young and why someone hadn't come to clean the ants off.

"Catherine Mahoney, Beloved Daughter, Our Beautiful Angel 1925-1929" 1929?? Now my imagination threw the extremely different era into the mix. So long ago, but I wanted to know her, to know WHY she died, to know how she could have been, had she lived around the same time as me, what she looked like and if we could have been best-friends.  But, she was dead, she lived a long, long time ago and since I was secretly questioning EVERYTHING about my Catholic faith, I could get pretty depressed after one of these visits.

But not all of the time. Lots of afternoons were spent imagining all sorts of endings and beginnings and middles of these previously lived lives. I mention them in this order because of the presentation given to me and because of this I felt as though I were reading an imagined book, but had cheated each time by reading the ending first . . .

Eventually, my father began replacing these cemetery outings with visits to museums and arboretums. I would come to miss the gravestones, however, and the sad statues along with the lonely thoughts inscribed in old, weathered rock faces. But the museums had paintings and some had statues and some had pretty poetry engraved in dark, unexpected places.

As I grew older and then became a mother, I've found it interesting  that  as much as I used to miss these cemetarial visits, I'd never thought to take MY children to visit stranger's cemeteries, or any cemeteries. No one very close to us has died, so we just never went.

We've gone to lots of bowling alleys though. Lots of pizza places, (Chucky Cheese, when they were little). Tons of movies, where we'd feast on every piece of junk food that I wasn't allowed to have as a child. Various nightclubs, (as they became teenagers), to watch musician-friends and songwriter-friends perform and we've taken a few trips together. But no visiting stranger's cemeteries.

When I came upon this odd memory a few weeks ago, I mentioned it to my girls, who are now almost grown.

"That's a little weird, huh?" I asked my youngest, knowing exactly what she was going to say.

"Uh, yeah," she replied, with an expression to match her tone. I laughed, but pressed on.

"Do you think you'll be taking any of YOUR future children to visit cemeteries of people you don't know?"  

I held my breath, not really knowing why.

"Uh, no." Her expression softened as she turned to me.

"No, mom, I will not be taking my children to visit cemeteries of people I don't know."

That,  though I'm not sure why, is welcome news.

Copyright 2007 Rose Loya