I am tired

[suninvited]

of funerals. I guess when you get to be my age, you have to expect the previous generation to start passing. I hate it. I had my favorite Uncle's funeral today. My aunt's funeral last week.

This burial was in the same cemetery as my mother, who died in 1994. This is the first time I have been there since my mother died. It is very far out in the country. I can't find it on my own.

It was a very emotional day for me.

[av8rdave]

1. I am so sorry

I know how it feels. The 8th anniversaries of my mother and FILs passing are coming up over the next week (the passed away one week apart - on opposite coasts).

Every year, I expect the anniversaries to get easier, but they never seem to.

[suninvited]

2. It never gets easier

today was so hard on me because my uncle was buried right beside my mother. My father was with me at the funeral, but I saw his tombstone, too. I don't even want to think about being without my father.

[av8rdave]

3. Same here....

Funerals suck. Hope tomorrow is a much better day for you!

[Tangerine LaBamba]

4. It's rough, and I'm sorry you're having a hard time

Circle of life and all that. People live, people die, we do the best we can in the time we have. It can all be gone in an instant.

I am lucky. I was raised in an Italian-American family, first generation Americans for parents, and Italians have so much more affection for the dead than they do for the living, so weekly trips to the cemetery with my Dad were routine for me as a kid. There was no such thing as Perpetual Care, not when there were survivors, so we took the gardening tools and trimmed the grass, raked it up, and disposed of the trimmings.

Those summer evenings were some of the sweetest of my childhood, because, as we did the garden work, he told me stories about the people buried there, relatives I'd never known, and they became real and alive for me. We took our good old time, too, and never went home until it started to get too dark to see.

The cemetery was where he first let me drive his car. I was about nine years old and long-legged, so he decided I should learn to drive his stick shift Buick. Wasn't much damage I could do in the cemetery - no other cars, and no people crossing. It was a great place to learn to drive, and, later, to learn about drinking beer, about making out with boys, and about the power of being a teenage girl with a driver's license.

In my adult life, I've taken thousands of photographs of cemeteries all over the world. They're still my favorite places for finding stories.

It's when the cemeteries become only repositories for the dead, with nothing but sadness draping them, that they become dangerous and difficult places. I'm grateful to my Dad for giving me the gift of fearlessness and familiarity. Fearlessness where death and loss are concerned, familiarity with people who got me here, but who didn't stick around for my arrival.

Again, I'm sorry you are going through such a difficult time.

[suninvited]

5. I really think that after all this

I am going to become a cemetery photographer, too.

I am going to build a website (if you build it, they will come) with photographs of Texas country cemeteries.

Those names meant something to me, I guess the real sadness arrives when the names mean nothing.

[crimsonblue]

6. it gets easier with time.

that's what I figured out.