Memorial Day is almost here, so I’m once again planning to make the "flower rounds" at the cemeteries where my Evans family are buried. For many decades, this was a sentimental, annual trip I would make with my Great Aunt Ethel Evans and Mama Bore. After Ethel (top in the picture above) died in 2000 at age 97, it became Mom and me going to the cemeteries, and since her health declined in late 2008, I started going alone last year. It’s sure not the same being by myself.Ethel, her husband (my Great Uncle Jobe), and his parents are buried in a little country cemetery, Mount Pleasant, west of LaFontaine. No one else in the family makes the trek to this beautiful spot. “You were their favorite,” Mom has always said about Ethel and Jobe, and I suspect she’s right. They never had children of their own, so I was about as close to a grandchild as they had, mainly because I was their only relative who truly enjoyed hanging around on their farm. I have always had a fondness for dirt.
I never knew the boys in this picture. Great Uncle Chester, at top, left Kansas as a young man, and Raymond, who is holding the baby (my Grandma Evans), died of a brain tumor when he was only 9-years-old. Grandma and he are buried in Neodesha next to their mother, Great Grandma Rose, and my Grandpa Evans. I never met him, either, because he was killed in a refinery accident in 1941. He was a brother to Jobe. The sisters, Ethel and Pearl, married brothers. When I got my divorce in 1998, I had my last name legally changed and that’s how I became an Evans, too.
I wonder if anyone will take the trouble to lay flowers on their graves when I am no longer around, or if their lives will be like so many others. Gone and forgotten. No family around who knew them, who laughed with them, who held their hands. Just a granite marker with a few dates to show someone below was born and died. No memories in between. Will the time come when no one puts flowers on their graves for Memorial Day? I hope not, but I know better.
3 comments:
You know that is one thing that depresses me beyond anything...to think no one will even know what a great person you were..or how you would laugh and be so fun.
You just have a rock to show you were once here.
oh and on another note. I often like to visit graveyards and read the stones. I will read and try to imagine the person and what their life was like.
I hope someone will do that with mine :)
My memory of Memorial Day was the weeks leading up to it spent in the Fredonia Cemetary with muriatic acid cleaning the years worth of cement dust out of the lettering!
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