Cemeteries

 Tomorrow marks 20 years since my mother died of Alzheimer's.  We drove down to Riverside National Cemetery to put flowers on her grave and to visit the grave of my friend Kaye who is also buried there.  It is a long drive and I had a lot of time to reflect both on the way there and on the way home.

AS I walked along the graves to find their stone, I reflected on the sacrifices of those men and women who are there.  Most of the graves near My folks and Kaye are older people who came home from the war and lived out their lives  There was no active war going on when they died, so the area is filled with soldiers who were presumably not on active duty.  Most near my dad say WWII or Viet Nam.

As I walked along the grass covered graves I thought of this poem .  I thought it was Whitman, but it turns out it was Carl Sandberg.

Grass

By Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

                                          I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

                                          What place is this?

                                          Where are we now?

                                          I am the grass.

                                          Let me work

I thought about the people I did not know behind the names on the grave markers, saw what their loved ones placed on the headstones  I particularly liked the couple whose stone  ( after their names and dates) read " Forever Ice cream"  It made me smile, as I suppose it was intended to.

I did not have the desire to stand before any of the graves with a cheese-eating grin and a "thumbs up" I thought about how horrible I felt, looking at that picture this morning and I was sick at heart that the candidate and that soldier's family acted like they were at a picnic, rather than mourning her death. Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe things have changed so much in this country that pictures like that one are the way we do it.  I don't know.

I thought about Arlington. Hallowed ground that began as a "fuck you" to Robert E. Lee whose front lawn was where the first bodies were buried. I found it interesting that the land belonged to Martha Washington's first husband and her son inherited it.  Her great-granddaughter ultimately inherited it.  She was married to Robert E. Lee -so since he was her husband, it became his.

Call me meanspirited, but I do not think that a former president who tried to overthrow the government, wants to destroy the Constitution, got out of the Vietnam war on a false medical diagnosis  and calls our brave soldiers "losers" and "suckers"  Should be buried at Arlington.  Let his rest beside his first wife in an unkept grave on his golf resort/cemetery in New Jersey.