Remember Me

Memorial Day, 2010

As child visiting my grandmother, Winiferd Bell Porter Harris, at her home in on the Clearview Farm, Lovell, Wyoming, I was often regaled ancestral stories of the Mormon pioneers. Those stories were filled with faithfulness, strength, and endurance. They were also filled with a poignant sense of loss most especially when it came to the stories of leaving the dead behind in the unmarked graves. Grandmother would read the the story of a Porter ancestor who as a child was too soon called upon to be mother to her siblings and how she must have felt as she left the site of her mother's burial, knowing that that place would be lost forever in memory. There would be no head stone to declare the sacred spot. No place to lay flowers in honor or remembrance. No moments of quiet conversation as though the dear one were close by because she stood where the last remains lay. There was only the dry, and the wind, and the sun, and the hard march to the valley ahead.

The thought of unmarked or untended graves seemed to bother my grandmother a great deal. On one occasion she took me to see an abandoned cemetery not far from the farm. It was a small square plot of land filled with sun bleached weeds blown into a tight hedge against a wavering fence. The graves seemed to me to be oddly crowded together in a place where there were vast reaches of empty space. I imagined the coffins had been snuggled together for comfort. Or perhaps is was out of unknown necessity that they lay tucked close to one another. I never knew for certain. But I do know that Grandma Winnie was deeply saddened by the fact they remained untended and unclaimed by others who might have remembered who the dead were and what they had stood for.

Many years later when I was a young mother, my grandparents came to Salt Lake City to live out their final chapters of their lives. At the time of my grandfather's death, my grandmother asked me if I would promise to look after her grave after she died. I didn't understand the request. After all, Wastach Lawn, the place where she planned to be buried next to my grandfather was a well established and beautifully maintained cemetery. Nevertheless, I gave my word.

As the years have passed I have kept that promise, watching over the maintenance on the graves of my grandparents, then later my parents, and other family members interred close by. Were the headstones secure, the sod kept in abeyance, the leaves swept away? Each time I stopped I took a moment of silence to remember. A small thing for the lives lived, but there it was.

This year, while visiting my son, Dan, and his family in Vegas, we were invited to participate in my daughter-in-law's family's Memorial Day tradition. We crossed the valley back forth in caravan--aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and great aunts and uncles, visiting the graves of three sets of family members. At each site, pictures of the departed were shared as well as wonderful stories of the lives lived. Each story was a timely reminder of how we are connected in a never ending chain by the choices we make and those made by our ancestors. What a wonderful tradition. Hats off the the whole Gibson clan for their faithfulness.

Although the idea had occurred to me before, it came home to me more profoundly than ever as we stood in the Lone Mountain cemetery this past Monday, that what my grandmother had been asking for was not maintenance of a grave site, but remembrance of a life.

So here's to you, Grandmother dear. I salute you as a woman who loved whole heartedly--her family, her faith, her home. I salute you as a woman who loved learning and beauty and sought one and created the other where ever she dwelt. I salute you as a woman of incredible strength. I know barely a handful of women who could live through one day of your life as recorded in your journal, much less wake up the next morning and start again.

I remember you, Grandma. I remember the marcel waves in your hair, the sturdy heeled tie shoes you wore with your every-day dresses, your aprons, your wide-brimmed straw tied down straw hat that kept the sun off of your face when you gardened. I remember the smell of your home made bread, the smell of the wheat you roasted before you hand ground it into cereal you cooked for Grandpa Leland, and the smell of your powder when you bent down to give me a hug.

I remember your hands--how lovely I thought they had become written on by age and experience and how sad I was to discover when you passed away that you had asked to have a nosegay to cover them in the casket because you thought them ugly. I remember you, Winiferd Bell Porter Harris, and I promise not only to tend your grave site, but your memory as well.