Memorial Day

It is early enough in the morning to still be dark outside and I am standing in Rhonda’s back garden, as a deer, a yearling walks by and then another and I am blessed.  Home.

***

Later I learn that Doc Watson died Tuesday.  Washington Post

And I remember back to Ronceverte, 1977 and the bluegrass festival where I saw and heard Doc Watson – the one and only time that I did.

And I remember Uncle Howard dying – the catastrophe for my cousins; but if I am truthful, the interruption of a bluegrass festival in the mountains of West Virginia that I would return to after the funeral for me.

It’s Memorial Day.  I for one like very much that we have moved from remembering the dead who died in wars to simply remembering the dead.

My mother will go alone to the cemetery today, for all her accompaniers of times past have died before her.  I miss them; but she honors them.

Willing or unwilling, the one who lives on becomes the witness to a collective past to which the dead may no longer attest.

My mother, Harriett Pyles, with her family at Thanksgiving

Today I picture my mom at the family cemetery for my dad’s family, paying homage to a people not her own, remembering the various aunts and uncles, babies who never made it that she never knew alongside her own mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and husband.  And I picture her imagining her own people, buried hours away at the other end of the state – her own parents and sister Lucie and a bit of the ashes of brother Harvey and brother Howard – her protector and teacher, he the oldest and she the youngest - he the first of them to die, she to be the last in some future moment that awaits us all who draw breath.

My Uncle Howard was only 50 when he died.  It was sudden and it was tragic.  I remember the day and the days that followed.  I remember the sense of tragedy that I felt for his daughters, my cousins.  I remember the concern I felt for his wife.  I remember the sadness I felt for my mother bereft of her protector, for them all.

***

When the second yearling walked by moments ago, she stood for a time, framed against the emerging dawn when she slowly turned her head and looked at me and for an instant only, we two saw each other - truly saw each other; and in the place within the mind of a deer that whispers . . . danger . . . human . . . she will remember me always and in that place within a human mind that whispers . . . she matters . . . I will remember her.

As with the yearlings, the passing of so many through a life sometimes changes the life, sometimes not.  But the life remembers.


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In one way, this is a fictionalized remembering.  Today is Memorial Day and so it is the day that my mother would, in times past, have been at the cemetery.  But moving all things to accommodate the long weekend fetish of we in the US, the last Monday in May long ago became the day when most folks do their Memorial Day-ing; so too with my mother.