Grave Respects — Wisconsin, September 16

I have always loved graveyards. In my coming-of-age years, I often snuck out after dark to lounge among the shadowed stones of the local cemetery with my friends. There we were free from the prying eyes and needs of our families, belonging only to ourselves.  Although we occasionally tried to spook each other, we were never actually frightened by the dead.

As Bob and I were leaving Lake Mills for Chicago, we decided to stop at Rock Lake Cemetery and pay our respects to Cousin Patty’s family. We drove in and immediately realized were never going to find Aunt Lois and Uncle Dick among twenty-five acres of markers.

So we called Patty for help. Lucky for us, she was free and willing to come over and show us around.

I listened to Patty’s stories about her parents, her younger brother, and her older sister. I was a fly on a tree with a camera, picturing myself in Patty’s shoes.

Patty’s younger brother died when she was nineteen years old. I could not get my heart around the magnitude of this tragedy. I tried and failed to imagine losing one of my precious brothers before I had found my footing in life.

I stared incomprehensibly at Patty’s sister’s tarnished white plaque, realizing that I am a lucky outlier, a seventy-year-old woman who has not lost any brothers or cousins.

Bob’s father, Bill, had two siblings, Patty’s father, Richard, and Becky’s mother, Mary. Patty’s mother, Lois, passed at the age of ninety-five in February and her father left this earth in 2010.

Both Patty and Steve told us how Lois was able to walk up the stairs to their place without holding onto the railing. They said it wasn’t until recently that she complained she was no longer able to pull on her socks while standing up. Ever since hearing that, I think of Bob’s Aunt Lois each time I’m tempted to sit down to put on my socks.

We had a second grave to find, this one on Aunt Mari’s side of the family. We spotted it right off, looming in the distance not far from the Armantrout plots.

Patty had told us that Mari’s son Scott had spared no expense on his memorial, but we were unprepared for what we found. The three of us stared at the towering black monument, stifling giggles and sighing.

Scott got cancer as a young boy but lived into his fifties, consuming every day as if it were his last. He came from money, so that helped. Bob says Scott always had the fastest motorcycle and the fastest boat on Rock Lake, so it made perfect sense that he would have commissioned the largest headstone in Rock Lake Cemetery.

 

Patty and Bob obligingly posed next to the polished granite, dwarfed by Scott’s legacy.

Our appetites wetted with family history, we decided to find Bob’s parents. Bob looked up his father on Find a Grave, made a phone call, and drove us the short distance to Helenville.

Zion Church Cemetery was a small, well-tended roadside park surrounded by autumn corn. The church was long gone.

Bob had no trouble locating the Armantrout markers.

Here lay his oldest brother, Rich, and his parents, Bill and Alice. It’s no secret that Bob’s family did not approve of his divorce. They were unable to accept me, and eventually Bob grew tired of hearing about it. Communication dropped off. Bob’s father called to tell Bob his mother had passed, but no one reached out to him after his father and brother died. It occurs to me that memorial stones represent the weight of a lifetime, whether short or long—all the complicated relationships and unspoken truths.

I don’t know what was going through Bob’s mind as he stood before the graves. Estrangement is hard on everyone, especially the survivors. I want to believe that he got some closure while standing near these markers on a beautiful fall day.