Beyond the Grave

A personal essay by Liz Alterman about coming to terms with a parent's death and helping the surviving parent through loss

Much like selecting a casket, choosing a gravestone is not one of the more pleasant shopping excursions you’ll undertake. (Pun intended.) 

This item on death’s endless to-do list weighs on my mother, heavy as a thick slab of polished marble.  

My father has been gone seven months and my mom wants the headstone inscribed and installed by the one-year anniversary of his death. I wonder if this is an arbitrary deadline or dictated by etiquette similar to the way you have a year to give a wedding gift.

Photo by Adrienne Merritt on Unsplash

The absence of a grave marker is a source of constant annoyance for my mother during her daily visits to the cemetery to “talk” to my dad. 

She believes that once it is in place, the cemetery will do a proper job of maintaining my father’s plot. Though he was buried in May, grass has yet to be planted. His area remains a rectangle of rocky soil where even dandelions refuse to grow. 

Each time my mother mentions the cemetery, she brings up the lack of landscaping.

“Your father would be very upset to see this,” she says. 

“I think anyone would be upset to see their own grave,” I want to say but press my lips together and pray for patience.

“You know how fanatical he was. He was always out there on that riding mower…tractor…whatever you want to call it,” she continues as if he were a pair of overalls and a straw hat away from morphing into Old MacDonald.

But it’s true. My dad, raised in a tiny apartment, took great pride in his property. To achieve a lush lawn, he wasn’t afraid to embrace some unusual methods, such as setting weeds on fire with a handheld blowtorch. 

Rather than hire an arborist to remove a dead tree, he cut down limb after hollow limp then connected a chain from the stump to the bumper of his Mercury Marquis. (Picture a candy apple red version of the behemoth driven by John Candy in Uncle Buck.) He’d jam the gas pedal to the floor, refusing to let up until either his car fender or the gnarly tangle of roots yielded. Next, he’d till the soil and plant a new tree. 

My mother can’t rest until his plot resembles the velvety sheen of a country club golf course. She calls the cemetery’s office repeatedly, pleading for a little grass seed. They offer her a bouquet of false promises.

“I think the groundskeeper knows my car and hides when he sees me coming!” she fumes. 

I picture a man in green coveralls darting behind a mausoleum as my mother’s silver Hyundai trundles through the gates of Holy Cross cemetery. 

She begins taking pictures of my dad’s dirt patch and sending them to my brothers and me. This is the lone time she doesn’t require help to forward a photo. Fury has made her tech savvy. 

When weeks pass and nothing changes, I intervene. After leaving several polite messages, I finally receive a call back from a cemetery administrator. 

“Now what’s this about?” a woman asks as if I haven’t outlined the situation in my many voicemails and supported it by emailing my mother’s photo evidence. 

The playfulness in the woman’s voice causes my mother’s rage to spark, sharp and hot, inside my chest. 

I want to say, “Listen, I’ve had to hear about this every day for the past dozen weeks and now you’re gonna hear about it too!” But I keep my tone even, a firm believer in my grandmother’s “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” wisdom.

I explain that it’s been months since my father was lowered into the ground and yet it looks like it happened yesterday. My mom, a 79-year-old widow, visits daily and views this as a lack of respect for her husband. I add that she and my dad paid Lord-knows-what for this plot and it doesn’t seem like too much to ask to see it cared for properly. 

The woman sighs. “Well, you know your father is buried on a hillside.”

I picture his gravesite, flat as a tennis court. “Um. no, my dad, is….” I attempt. 

She interrupts. “Plus, it’s very hard to get grass to grow with all the rain and sunshine we’ve had.” 

I pause to consider this. I’m no master gardener but sunshine and rain seem like precisely the elements one would hope for when attempting to grow grass. I try to make this point, but she cuts me off, assuring me they’re doing everything they can. My dad’s plot isn’t the only one that looks bad, she concedes. 

My fingers curl tighter around the phone. I’m so over the whole “misery loves company” approach to excusing incompetence. Someone telling me, “Yes, you’re in a crappy situation, but take heart, so are countless others!” is not helpful. 

I don’t feel better because large swaths of this cemetery could be mistaken for a run-down dog park. 

Dropping my voice an octave, I ask, mafia-crime-boss-style, “What’s it gonna take to get this done?”

“We’ll try to send someone out there right away,” she says. 

I thank her and end the call before she starts that bullshit about sunshine and rain again like some modern day Rob Base.

A week later, my mom mentions crabgrass has begun sprouting through cracks in the dirt and it takes everything not to shout “How are we still talking about this?!” 

On one hand, yes, they should maintain the property, but on the other, my father is dead and no amount of Scott’s Triple-Action turf builder is going to make that hurt any less.

I tell my mother I called the cemetery in an attempt to motivate the groundskeeping team. I expect her to be relieved, perhaps grateful even that I’ve taken up the fight on her behalf. She’ll know that I’m listening.

“You what?” The irritation in her voice crackles through the fiber optic cables. “I wish you hadn’t done that. I see that woman at church. This is so embarrassing. What did you say?” 

“I’ve repeated what you’ve told me every day for months now!” I say, head in my hands.

“Please don’t call again!” she says. 

Just as I’m about to scream, “Then you can’t talk about it again either!” a realization ripples inside me like wind sweeping through tall grass. 

Instead of wanting this resolved, my mother wants to complain. Perhaps rather than admit that she misses her husband or that she hates dealing with the lawyer he chose or relying on my brother for help with death certificates and online banking, she prefers to rail against this cemetery. Misplaced anger as catharsis, the slow opening of a different release valve. 

Would I be more helpful if I simply nodded and interjected “What a shame!” and “That’s awful!” at the proper intervals?

When nothing changes at the cemetery, my mother lures my youngest brother there, taking a wheelbarrow and a new approach.

“Well, your brother tried,” my mother sighs, “but he may have overdone it with the hay.” 

My phone pings and I stare at a photo of the plot which now looks like a scarecrow exploded atop it.

“Wow! Great!” I say with all the enthusiasm I can muster.

We are deep into autumn in New Jersey. Will grass even grow at this point? 

Soon my father’s resting place will be blanketed with snow. Will she want it removed? 

“You know how fanatical he was,” I imagine her saying. “He was always out there with his rock salt and his snow shovel.”

When she asks me to accompany her to choose a headstone, I can’t say no despite the fact that it’s up there with bathing suits and nursing homes in the “shopping trips you’d prefer to avoid” category.

Even with her promise of a post-headstone-picking lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, it’s a hard sell. Still, I go because who can say no to their widowed mother? 

As we walk into the store, bells tinkle overhead. The showroom is small, warm, and smells faintly of cigarette smoke the way my dad had for most of his life. 

I catch my breath remembering why we’re here. My father is gone. This is the last thing we will do for him. 

We are the lone shoppers surrounded by ceramic angels, their wings forever still, chubby-cheeked cherubs, crosses, all those rectangles and squares of various stone, marble, granite. In the corner, the owner sits behind a desk. He doesn’t acknowledge us.

“That makes no sense,” he barks into his phone. 

My ears prick. I turn to my mom.

“What?” she asks. She treats her hearing aids like earrings—somedays she wears them, others she doesn’t. 

I tilt my head toward the man who, as if on cue, repeats, “That makes no sense to me.”

“That makes no sense” was my father’s catchphrase. 

It irked my mother as she believed he was intentionally being difficult, not paying attention, or insulting her assured command of language. 

“It wasn’t always easy,” she’ll shake her head and say frequently, “but when it’s no longer possible, you’d give anything for one more conversation." 

It isn’t a two-way dialogue but at that moment, my father is there with us, speaking through this man who eventually ends his call and explains to us the differences between marble and granite, itemizes shipping costs and expected delays. 

We have focused on grass, obsessed about finding the perfect stone and ensuring it’s firmly in the well-manicured ground by a certain date. But in the quiet in-between we can hear him, speaking from beyond the grave, if we’re still enough to listen.

Liz Alterman is the author of the memoir Sad Sacked, the young adult thriller He’ll Be Waiting, a finalist for the Dante Rossetti Young Adult Fiction award, and the domestic suspense novels The Perfect Neighborhood and The House on Cold Creek Lane. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and numerous other outlets. She lives in New Jersey and spends most days microwaving the same cup of coffee and looking up synonyms. For more, visit lizalterman.com.

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