Gravestone
It’s time to pick a gravestone. Yep, I know, it’s been 2 years. It's probably past time. I don’t live by a certain time frame for this though. Grant doesn’t have a grave or a gravestone or any memorial to speak of right now. There are a lot of reasons for this.
I bought a rock a while back, it’s Merlinite, a beautiful black stone. I got it to be a sitting rock that will go next to his gravestone, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten. His gravestone is only an inkling to me of how do I do this? With a bit of an idea and a lot more of I don’t want to do this and no one is making me.
I haven’t done it still as we’re going into the 3rd year after his death. I’ve looked on google search for ideas. I actually discovered one of the top searches is Grant Thompson grave/tomb/burial site. I click on the links and there are grand monuments that have somehow been attached to his name.
I look at them with surprise, then a chuckle. The internet does not have the truth. I have the full truth of this. Right here in my home, I know exactly where his body is and that there is no gravestone for him yet.
His cremated body is in my bathroom cabinet. He told me he wanted cremation. When he first died, I wanted to bury him in our backyard. Now, maybe that sounds a little morbid but I wanted his body close and I wanted to know where it was.
I didn’t want him far away in a cemetery. That felt like he was being moved away from me, the kids, our life. I wanted him close. How could I bury my husband in a cemetery and what cemetery would it be anyway? I had no idea. He’s from Canada. Do I take him up there to be buried? Maybe.
How do the children see his gravesite if it were so far away? Should I bury him in my family cemetery? Um… I don’t have one, really. I have relatives buried all over, yet that’s not his family. I could bury him in the cemetery next to our old house, but we moved. Now it’s our old house.
I don’t even know how to buy a plot there or even if there are any? Then I think about all those boxes under the ground. Grant can’t be boxed in. I don’t want him to be part of the masses of forgotten bodies in a cemetery full of people we don’t know, where the living go to see the dead.
Death is a part of every moment of our lives now. It’s no longer an experience that exists somewhere outside of our life. It’s now at home. So home is where I want to keep this experience of death. I don’t want to pretend or ignore it by burying him in some plot that I don’t have to see or look at.
Death is so real and we can’t hide from it, so why or how could I even try to put him away somewhere like that. I still want him buried in my backyard, so that’s why I cremated him. That and he told me a couple days after he died, he said, ‘please cremate me.’
The city apparently has regulations that you can’t just bury bodies in your backyard, even if it's a loved one, so go figure. I did find out that apparently it is possible to bury someone in your backyard, but it’s not really something that is done; so there is a lot of red tape and barriers to get it approved.
Usually, it’s near impossible to do it within the time frame from when a person dies, to when they should be safely out of sight and in the ground to rot in peace. To be where no one will see the process of what that looks like, I mean who would want to see that?
There are reasons we get the dead out of sight ASAP. I’m not sure there are many of us that would want to see more than we have to. In the 2 weeks after someone dies, there is far too much to deal with than there is time to contemplate what you really want and how to do it.
I ouldnt’t think, what do I really want to get from or in this experience of processing my hus. Looking back you’ll know what you’d want to do, but in the moment, it's too volatile. That’s just part of the experience that is death.
So as I’m getting around to looking at gravestones and the whole process one afternoon between business calls and work and school and house and finding myself again and again. Another reason I haven’t done it till now. I didn’t want to finalize this reality.
It’s just another thing to do when someone dies that you don’t plan on, nor know how to do. In my circumstance, avoiding it is easier than doing it, well at least it seemed that way at first. At least for a few minutes I think that, until I realize that I’ve been thinking about it for 2 years.
It feels like it’s still something that should be done. And since I still want it in my backyard because as my children play, they’ll see their daddy’s gravestone and remember him, I contemplate. I think of when friends would come over and would see a gravestone.
They’d feel the uncomfortable feeling of looking at it for the first time and see that death has been here. When we would have a backyard party, our guests would see that in the end, it all ends. They would see there isn’t really a way to hide from it when the gravestone is at the party.
Although that wouldn’t really work, I want to remember that there is no hiding. I won’t hide, I want to live in reality, and in reality there is death. So I look at tombstones and try to figure out how to pick one? What will it say?
How can it even do justice to the life lived by the person it will represent. Most importantly, when those of us still living look at it, we can know that one day our name will be there on some rock somewhere. What is a good enough epitaph for Grant!
What can it teach us as we look at the cold hard stone? We can remember there is only one life to live. At the end, you’ll have a stone to mark your place, if you’re lucky enough to have someone who will get one for you.