I drove out to the cemetery this morning

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." — Psalm 23:4

I drove out to the cemetery this morning before the heat. Memorial Day is a morning for the cemetery, and I have gone early for as long as I can remember, since before there were people of my own to visit.

My father is in the older section, under the red oak that was already tall when he was buried. The stone has the service dates and the branch of service and nothing else. He came home from the war, married my mother, ran the hardware store on Main Street for most of his working life, and died of a heart attack on a Saturday morning in the kitchen. The war was underneath all of it. He never once told us what he saw over there, and the stone does not say. Two lines of type and the dates. My mother brought peonies to his grave every spring. I cut the first of mine this morning from the side of the house, where they have gotten too big and I have not cut them back, and brought them.

Earl is two rows over, in the newer part where the stones are flatter and the grass is kept short. I stood there a while. I do not talk to Earl at the cemetery. I talk to Earl at home, in the kitchen, in the early morning when I am sitting at the table with the house quiet. The cemetery is where his body is, which is not the same as where I keep him.

But I come. I bring flowers and I stand and I do what a person does, which is remember. Seven years this summer. I have lived longer without him now than I expected to when the doctors said what they said the fall before he died. I had not imagined the years going on this long, and they have gone on, and I have been in them, and here I am at the stone on another Memorial Day morning with peonies in a mason jar.

There were other families. Some I knew and some I did not. A young woman with two small children at a newer stone, and the children were quiet in the way children are quiet when they understand something important is happening but do not know what it is. I did not speak to her. Some mornings the kindest thing you can do for a person is leave them alone with their grief.

The cemetery in Lexington holds a lot of the dead. Some of them go a long way back. This is old country, and the ground has been holding people for generations, and on Memorial Day the living come and stand over the ground and do what they can, which is remember. I do not think remembering fixes anything. I do not think it needs to. The act of standing at the grave and setting the flowers on the dirt is its own complete thing. It does not require anything after it.

I was home by nine. The screen door was open and the morning was warm and the yard smelled the way it does in late May, which is cut grass and something green underneath it that I have never been able to name.

Lord, have mercy on the ones we remember and the ones nobody comes for.