A few months ago, my mom and grandad came to visit me in Denton. I drove them around town and they gave me a tour of my then unknown family history in this town. We drove past the house my grandad lived in when he was a college student here, we went by the houses he built with his father, houses my mom remembers visiting door by door as a little girl to collect the rent money (because who is going to say no to my mom’s blue eyes?). On the square I learned where the hardware store used to be, and which building was once a JC Penny (where Grandad had his first job).
Then we went past 35 to this little sidestreet called Roselawn. We followed it for a few miles before coming to a large cemetery. My mom made the usual inquiries at the office and they told us where to find the people we were searching for. I can’t tell you exactly what relation I am to the people in that dirt, many of them had names I would never identify as being tied to my own, but I was told about each of them in turn, usually accompanied by a funny or tragic anecdote.
I have a weird relationship with cemeteries. Let’s be honest, if you think about it practically they are the biggest waste of real estate in the world. Acres of land taken up by decomposing bodies just so one, maybe two, generations will have some place to come and mourn. Once the flowers have wilted there is no more use for the place.
But there is this romantic appeal to them. This vast space where the gone and forgotten lay with nothing but a stone thrown into the soil screaming, “I was here, damn it! I lived, I loved, I was kind and I was terrible, and look at me now!”
I went back to that cemetery by myself a few days ago. I couldn’t remember where my family was so I just drove around slowly. I thought maybe I’d find good material for a story, or at the very least the tombstones could provide some better character names than the ones I’ve been coming up with lately. What I found instead was a story already told. I found Hunter Ray Brooks.
Hunter was born 7/29/01 and died 10/24/01, five days after my dad’s death. New toys were placed carefully next to the rock and there was even a cake made of paper flowers with a number “8″ candle. His parents had bought one of those three in one tombstones with Hunter in the middle and space on either side for Mom and Dad (their names and birthdays already eerily waiting for their final piece of information). The parents still came to visit their first born, they will one day be united again, but their lives have continued in the last 8 years, and a sign above Hunter’s picture informs him and everyone that he is now a “Big Brother.”
I left thinking about cemeteries, about Hunter and his parents, I left thinking about my grandad who showed me this place. His health has been failing this year, and everytime my Mom’s name pops up in my caller-id I expect it to be “the call.” He’s 81 years old, widowed by my grandmother and remarried, he once lived in Denton and built houses with his Dad, worked at a JC Penny nobody even knows used to be there. Soon, sooner than I like to think, all these years and experiences will be summarized by his name on a rock and a few feet of dirt. It seems so inadequate.
It seems like such a waste.
