~to honor the living and the dead~

We are heading home to south central Kansas this upcoming Decoration Day weekend.  It's been quite a while since we were back there and it will be good to make our way to the north in order to visit family and friends that were left behind after Mike and I were married in 2013. Although I ended up loving my 2-year stay in Colorado as well as my 2 years here on the plains of Texas, I still consider the "Sunflower State" to be my home.

I always will.

Our stay there will be quite brief with only a couple of days turnaround time but at least we get to go and for that, I do give thanks.  Since it is Memorial Day weekend, one of the important stops that we will be making along the way will be the city cemetery at Halstead, Kansas where all of my family has been interred since the early 1900's.  Although it was never my hometown, I surely found that we spent much time there as kids growing up.  Halstead was the childhood home of both of my parents so when my dad died in 1982, it seemed the logical place for him to be laid to rest.  My mom, a brother and sister, a niece, most of my aunts and uncles/cousins, and all of my grandparents and great grandparents are there as well.  

It is time to pay a visit to them all.

When I was a kid growing up, Memorial Day was a sacred day on the calendar.  No matter what, whether we were busy or not, our family always went to take care of the graves of our deceased family members.  There was never any question about it, just something that we always did.  Decorating the final resting places of all of our family members on the Brown and the Scott side of the house took a little doing, but my mom, her sisters and their mom would not have it any other way. 

Back in the early days, the only thing I remember them using were real flowers like the roses and peonies that grew in Grandmother Brown's backyard garden.  Later, I remember that my aunts would bring along small bouquets of Sweet William to adorn the grave sites.  For days prior, all of them would save small jars and wrap them with tinfoil to be used as containers for the floral offerings that would be given.  Sometime later on, my mom started to use silk flowers instead and rather than just leaving them to be thrown away in the weeks that would follow, we'd make the journey out to pick them up and put them away to be used the year following.  

Memorial Day weekends and drives to all of the cemeteries weren't just about putting out flowers for our family.  That was only a small part of the purpose in going there.  For an hour or more, we would walk the cemetery with our mom and grandmother as we listened to them talk about the living history inscribed upon the gravestones of so many people.  As a kid, I swore that they must have known the life story of every single person whoever lived in town. There was no one that they didn't seem to know about.  It was from those yearly strolls amongst the rows upon rows of graves, that I began to learn so much about myself and who I really was.

I learned that a man named Charlton Brown was my grandfather's cousin and he had fought in the Civil War.  I was taught just by reading the inscription upon her headstone, that my great-aunt Mary died in her younger years, a victim to the influenza outbreak of 1918.  By visiting my great-grandparents grave, I learned that my Grandmother Schilling came to America from her homeland of Germany by boat in the late 1800's as a very young girl looking to find a new life here.  

And the history lesson went on and on and on.

Sunday afternoon I will pause a moment in time to honor those that have died in my family as I decorate the graves of my parents (dad died in 1982 and mom in 2007), my brother Mike who died in 2007 of ALS as well as my sister Janice who was killed in an auto accident in 1969.  I'll leave flowers for their graves plus the grave of my young niece Kimberly who was involved in the accident with her mother but managed to live until 1993.  I'll stop by the graves of both sets of grandparents, and even stop by my great-grandparents' grave in the old part of the cemetery.  

It will be like "old home week" or something.

At age 61 and looking age 62 square in the eyes come this late October, I realize that I'm closer to joining them all than I used to be when I first traipsed across this hallowed ground as a youngster.  As I've grown older, I've learned to appreciate all that much more the sacrifices that each of them made in their lives.  Stopping by the cemetery this Sunday upcoming is a way to honor them and to remember the great impact they each had upon my life. Perhaps some day when I too am gone from this earth, there will be someone who loved me enough to pay a visit to my grave as well.

I can only hope.

These will be a small part of the floral offerings that I plan to take to the cemetery.  When our mom passed away 10 years ago now, we covered her casket up with sunflowers and red roses.  It was a beautiful sight to behold.  I thought she might like them once again.  

Honoring and remembering both the living and the dead is what I was taught to do as a child.