Perpetual Remembrance
Photo by Abby Ciucias
It was after just a brief glance that the incongruity struck me and got me thinking.
For me, there is a joy in taking secondary roads, particularly on the western side of the eastern mountain ranges of our continent. Very quickly, it becomes evident that the surveyors dividing up the new parcels of land had a work-saving plan made possible by easy topography. The Atlantic coast of North America brought the tired and poor, as well as the industrious and ruthless, to migrate from their foreign shores to fertile and steadily more populated coastal areas of America. To migrate to the open lands of Ohio and Indiana, and onward and outward.
The industrious brought with them the idea of ownership and a divine right to the dominance and possession of the Earth not known to indigenous cultures. The industrious brought with them the tools and methods for dividing up whatever lands by whatever means those lands came into their possession, and they were in need of legal documentation. It was a very large parcel, America, and for a while it seemed incomprehensibly and endlessly huge.
They surveyed efficient grids along the cardinal directions of the compass to divide the land. Very few of the twisting cow paths that became widened muddy wagon trails and then wider twisting modern roads in a city like Boston, exist out west, at least not commonly. There can be, in the middle of endless gently undulating and alternating corn and soybean crop acres along a straight road, a disjointed but well-constructed 90-degree turn. Turns after which the main road goes straight and continues in whatever cardinal direction, but becomes a smaller country road. A small road to other fields and farms blazing in the glory of morning sun with early morning mist, under blue skies and scattered clouds and off the beaten track. The traveler, hopefully awakened from the hypnosis of the highway, slowly and gracefully follows as the well-constructed and banked road, curves from south to east, or north then west; it depends on where you are heading, but often making a full 90-degree turn, in the prescribed directions of north, south, east, or west.
On secondary roads, it is still easy to make good time, and there are more opportunities to see farms and villages and towns up close. Approaching those rural settlements becomes a relaxing game of awakening from velocitization by reading the speed limit signs and simply releasing the gas pedal, occasionally shifting to a lower gear in order to avoid using the brake pedal. Slowly entering a populated area at posted speeds down from 65, to 55, to 45, to 35, and even to 25 on a main street downtown. I honor those residents and their requirement to go slow. In some rural settings, children still ride their bicycles in wobbly accelerations and with the oblivious and certain confidence of the safety of their normally quiet community of drivers.
I have even seen people walking around in their small towns, not tourists but townspeople. I am only reporting that it seems unusual in this modern day when friends will sit inside their living rooms, or perhaps even on their front porches, and text or email friends who are right next door.
It serves my curiosity to observe those speed limits imposed for safety, since I spent my transit time through their world craning my neck, looking left and right, and peering deeply down alleys. Attentively driving, but always looking around to see the buildings and the layout of a town. I enjoy seeing the architecture, divine and mundane; churches, gas-and-go stations, businesses, main streets. A church with a well kept and well designed playground with diversely diverting challenges in the children’s play area, tells me something about the people. The care of lawns, the paint on houses, the weeds growing out of cracks in pavement, the health of trees, the small advertised businesses, the side roads; dirt or paved; all say something about the prosperity and soul of a community. I accept that my type of moving scan of their world can only offer a cursory and superficial impression, but it seems more respectful than a riveted focus on the roadway, over concern with the danger of traffic with only a few cars and trucks, attention to directional road signs or my ultimate destination–which often is not decided. It is their town, they can go the speed they choose, but out of respect for them, I keep to the speed limit.
In this town I drove past a cemetery, which was on my right as I waited at a traffic light. Here, just a brief glance through a row of trees. I was on an elevation only feet below the random row of mature trees 100 feet away that served as a border to that cemetery. I was on a visually level plane to look through the unbranched tree trunks onto the rows of gravestones shining in the sun, and I was struck by the clearly effective social contract to neatly place flowers on most of the grave sites. Those flowers, we might think or hope, signifying that the people interred, in what we term a final resting place, are in some manner honored by that gesture above their hallowed ground: Evidence that those at eternal rest still mean something to someone?
Forgive me? The sentiment of what seems like faint gestures at gravesites, of that sad spectacle, was lost on me. I have no idea why, but I was shaken by a sense of a weak and hopeless denial of the undeniable—that everything comes and goes. People, flowers. Of course, no offense is meant by suggesting that there are those who are not at all fettered by guilt and shame, no matter how much some may say that they should feel guilty and should be ashamed! We do as humans do, within a full range of beliefs and actions, just because those actions don’t make sense to us doesn’t mean anything. Grief is a personal experience. We have rituals to help our memories and sometimes induce our gratitude. There are many customs for honoring the dead. Flowers on graves is a common custom.
One can rightfully suggest that it is my problem that their gesture seems so futile in its attempt to communicate a meaningful emotion of love and respect. Perhaps their gesture truly did bear the sentiment for the families involved, and that is all that matters. But does their emotion need to be advertised in frozen perpetuity? Don’t get me wrong, bouquets of plastic flowers placed all along the rows of stone markers took some effort, but a modest effort at best. An oil-based petrified remembrance. If it is ‘the thought that counts’, then we, I, must leave this vision of remembrance with the conclusion of meager thoughts. They seemingly sacrificed their diligent attempt to honor others, on a flimsy altar of practicality and efficiency. I am challenged to offer a generous allowance to those involved in their low-maintenance remembrance with plastic flowers. Are we all that busy, thoughtless, or are we afraid?
Honoring the dead is so ubiquitous among human cultures that there is evidence of practices going back thousands of years. Something in human beings seems to compel us to honor the dead with a ritual. Why? The act of remembering and honoring, it seems reasonable to make this assumption, should make us stop and stare and consider the impermanence of all life. A gift from the dead of the chance for reflection on the speedy direction of our own lives. Go ahead, name one thing with a physical form that is eternal…? I cannot think of one. Sure we have concepts, ideas, beliefs about what is beyond the physical world, but we do not know for sure regardless of what we hear or read second hand. Being reminded and embracing the truth of our impermanence can give us a kick in the pants to try to give more, to love more, to extract more joy from life each day. Now I am traipsing a bit afield from the plastic bouquets so indelibly fixed in my memory of that time and place, but please understand that such is the burden of inspiration.
It is at times like these, as I contemplate that cemetery, when it seems convenient and correct to find some easy truths to be self-evident, validated by my own experience: Life is short. For all our roar and bluster, even the mighty find, we are easily forgotten.
It is something to think about, it is something I thought about, the genesis story of plastic flowers. The dead plantlife from tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago. The changes in the oceans with countless astronomically large numbers of dead microscopic, small hard-bodied and soft-bodied sea life, and plant life layered on the ocean floor. Tropical jungles, lush swamp land, and tidal vegetation, covered and crushed. The position of the major land forms before they pulled apart and floated into their current locations on liquified stone. The basins that collected the sediment of life cycles and natural erosion, throughout the world and in many areas of the United States. Even before the dinosaurs and the impact event that brought such profound and sudden climate change and an enduring winter that many species could not survive, they could not breed for enough generations to adapt. All of this did happen, and was recorded in the geological and archeological record long before modern humans arrived and were inspired to express themselves with art. And well before we had the language and concepts to define the nature of what we, human beings, might and could explain to others of our experience of life and death.
But these remnants of biological products lived, grew, died and were buried and compressed and buried and compressed. And then jostled by plate tectonics thrusting earth up and over itself and pressing earth down deeper into the places where the plates meet and grind to push up mountains of earth and also make molten mountains of liquid rock from the friction of earth on earth. So today, the sedimentary layers exposed by highway cuts that are found when hills and mountains are gouged out to make way for our cross-country travel, tell this story of life and death.
The point of my geo-historical digression being that the oil created and buried in layers of sediment is what was resurrected, or exhumed, to create those plastic flowers of perpetual remembrance. Those forms in the convincing shape of flowers seem to evoke a hollow sentiment, as if the form failed to be sufficient to take the place of the emotion and introspection required to truly honor those from whom the honoring loved ones descend. Of course, these are only my sensitivities. I have no place to sit in judgement of the good intentions of human beings who visit, for whatever reason, their deceased loved one and offer a perpetual, if fading, gesture of remembrance in the form of oil-based plastic flowers. I hope the gesture provides the living relatives a bit of comfort in having done at least some semblance of duty, offering some measure of gratitude, as they proceed in their denial of, or distraction from, their own destiny. They all, we all, still must inexorably face that great unknown.
It was within that brief moment of my turned head to an incongruous vision that I lived a short lifetime, that I saw the human predicament: The certainty of death and the very human motivation to deal with that certainty by building battlements against that truth with the symbols of immortality; pyramids, stone pillars or plastic flowers–enduring but not everlasting bastions against the ravages of time. It seems to be a human need.
The ritual, the meditation and mindfulness, of finding and selecting the correct or simply available cut flowers, preparing to support those bright delights of nature with water, and placing them at a gravesite, might stir full knowledge that our own lives will come far short of millennia just as these living flowery sacrifices will wilt and dry and crumble on the grave; and that no stones or human creations will ever meaningfully preserve our brief precious moments on this Earth. Woe that our humble ritual can be denied its power to inform us of one of the few reliable truths, and thereby awaken us to the simple wonders all around us, and the joys available while being alive.