For Wilshire Baptist Church
Sitting in lawn chairs under the trees on the first day of March, Mom and I talked about a lot of different things. We also watched as others around us tended to the details of life, death and forever.
We met at Restland Cemetery to put flowers on my sister Martha’s grave the day before her birthday on March 2. Mom texted me that morning and asked me to meet her “for 15 minutes or less.” Her promise of brevity was not lost on me, because we’re not a family that likes to hang out at the cemetery. But, it was a warm, pleasant afternoon, and I decided we might do something different this time. I’d seen how folks bring chairs and sit around the graves of loved ones at Garland Memorial Cemetery near our house, and I decided that might be a nice thing to do.
So, after putting white and yellow daisies in the bronze vase on Martha’s marker, we sat a while and talked. We talked about the details of Martha’s birth: how Dad took my brother and I across the street to our neighbor’s house before whisking Mom downtown to Baylor Hospital with her OBGYN, who was another neighbor, following close behind on Central Expressway. I shared my fuzzy three-year-old’s memory of my father driving my brother and me home from our grandparents’ house in Sherman to join something new happening at our home in Richardson. When I asked Mom how long she was in the hospital and she explained how all new mothers stayed in the hospital for four days back then, it all came together: My brother and I were dumped off quickly at the neighbors for the birth and then taken to Sherman so Dad could return to work while Mom and Martha convalesced at Baylor and then got settled at home.
We also talked about Dad, who three years ago was buried next to Martha. He had always missed her since that awful Easter week in 1971 when a drunk driver shattered our family. Dad had gotten on with life as one does, but his faith in the promise of forever was strong and he was quietly eager to join her someday.
As Mom and I talked, we watched a couple way off to our right who were tending to a grave with buckets and brushes and even a weed whacker and leaf blower. Restland does a fine job of keeping the grass trimmed and all that, but some people just have higher standards I suppose.
And off to our left, another couple was doing much the same but without the power equipment. After they had gone and when we were ready to break camp too, we walked the short distance and found that in addition to fresh flowers, the couple had hung a small wind chime and had sprinkled the site with fire ant killer. Looking at the grave, we saw it was for a man who passed away in 2023 at age 37. The marker said, “Beloved Son, Husband, Father, Brother,” and we surmised the couple tending so carefully to his resting place was his parents.
I commented that in their hearts and minds, he will be forever 37, just as Martha, who should have turned 63 this week, is forever nine. Likewise, Debra is forever 48, and my high school buddy John is forever 22. There are plenty more I know that are frozen in time that way. On the one hand, it makes me intensely sad because they missed so much of a life we could have shared with them. On the other hand, they didn’t have to endure the aches, pains, disappointments and regrets of getting older, not to mention the societal unrest and uncertainties of the 21st century.
But isn’t there another way to look at this – an Easter perspective? It’s this:
The moment we are born, we step onto the timeline of eternity. We’ll spend a fraction of that time in the world we know now, and the rest of it in a land or dimension or whatever it is we don’t know and don’t understand. It’s the greatest mystery of all mysteries, and because we don’t know much about what happens next, we tend to hang on tight to where we are now.
That clinging to “now” was very real Tuesday morning as LeAnn and I sat in an exam room at UT Southwestern, waiting for the doctor to come with news from my periodic post-cancer scan. Everything checked out fine, but I wonder what my reaction would have been if we had heard otherwise? I think I probably would have been devastated or at least disappointed, despite my faith there are great things waiting on the other side, including Martha and Dad.
That same trepidation about the unknown kept the visit with Mom at Restland relatively short, even with the comfort of chairs, the pleasant breeze and the easy conversation. It was Saturday, and we still had plenty of chores and life to live on this side of forever.